Tarasti's existential semiotics: Towards a functional model
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Rufus Duits,
Rufus Duits (b. 1979) is a teacher at St. Paul's School 〈rufus_duits@hotmail.com〉. His research interests include semiotics, existentialism, theories of truth, and Badiou. His publications include “On Tugendhat's analysis of Heidegger's concept of truth” (2007); and “The existential turn: Reappraising Heidegger's overcoming of metaphysics” (2010).
Abstract
The accompanying article aims to develop Eero Tarasti's inceptual theory of existential semiotics into a fully functioning if rudimentary model for semiotic analysis. It consists of the presentation, analysis, and critique of several of the essential but nebulous formulations that Tarasti offers, and the development on this basis of a tool for existential semiotic analysis: an existential version of Greimas' semiotic square. The particular concepts concerning which Tarasti is taken to task are transcendence, endo-/exo-signs, and understanding. In each case, the analysis and critique follows the same lines: revealing how Tarasti's implicit opposition to structuralism belies a fundamental misappropriation of the existential tradition and demonstrating how it is possible to develop his initial insights both into a more faithful appropriation of existentialism and into a more fundamental structuralism. On the foundation of the clarified concepts of transcendence, subjectivity, and understanding, an existential semiotic square is then developed that, while remaining rudimentary, will at least support basic existential semiotic analysis. Examples are given to demonstrate its functionality.
About the author
Rufus Duits (b. 1979) is a teacher at St. Paul's School 〈rufus_duits@hotmail.com〉. His research interests include semiotics, existentialism, theories of truth, and Badiou. His publications include “On Tugendhat's analysis of Heidegger's concept of truth” (2007); and “The existential turn: Reappraising Heidegger's overcoming of metaphysics” (2010).
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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- Urban morphogenesis
- The mirrored Madonna: Text and symbol in body writing artworks
- Termes d'adresse et liste
- Vision science: An empirical basis for Roentgen semiotics
- Do metaphoric gestures influence how a message is perceived? The effects of metaphoric gesture-speech matches and mismatches on semantic communication and social judgment
- Text semiotics: Between philology and hermeneutics – from the document to the work
- Audiovisual texture in scene transition
- Le chronotope littéraire de l'étranger
- Pointing to show agreement
- Intertextuality, translation, and the semiotics of museum presentation: The case of bilingual texts in Chinese museums
- Codes, heterogeneities, and structures: Visual information and visual art
- The world has changed forever: Semiotic reflections on the experience of sudden change
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- Shaking grounds, unearthing palimpsests: Semiotic anthropology of disaster
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- Review of Søren Brier's (2008) Cybersemiotics: Why information is not enough
- Tarasti's existential semiotics: Towards a functional model
