A semiotic lifeworld. Semiotics and phenomenology: Peirce, Husserl, Heidegger, Deleuze, and Merleau-Ponty

1 Disclaimer

In this article, an attempt is made to construct a semiotic Lebenswelt and to compare it with the concept of lifeworld originally formulated in phenomenology. A warning is therefore necessary: not only are “semiotics” and “phenomenology” complex and heterogeneous fields with differentiated positions within them, but the authors discussed here have often, in different phases of their work, held different positions on these and other points. For this reason, even when terms such as “semiotics,” “phenomenology,” or even “Husserl,” “Peirce,” “Heidegger” or “Merleau-Ponty” are used, it is not intended to imply that behind each of these words lies a single position. Nevertheless, given the numerous attempts to bring semiotics and phenomenology together, or even to think of Peircean phenomenology as “a possible variant” of Husserlian phenomenology (Sonesson 2017: 101), I believe it is important to try to extract some features that highlight their relative specificities and, ultimately, their different objectives. After all, Spiegelberg (1956) and, especially, Ransdell (1989) already pinpointed several differences between the two phenomenologies, while underlining “their different attitudes to Descartes and to science.” For this reason, when we talk about phenomenology or the lifeworld, it seems interesting to see in what way we can construct a heuristic concept of it today, through semiotics.

2 Semiotic lifeworld and phenomenological lifeworld

In some essays that represent the very foundation of semiotics as a discipline, Charles Sanders Peirce showed how human beings have no ability to derive cognitions directly from objects, without previous knowledge – which he calls “interpretants” – intervening to structure our point of view. The name chosen by Peirce is interesting: Peirce calls elements of previous knowledge interpretants because they interpret the world before the subjects and direct us to interpret things in one direction rather than another. Therefore, according to Peirce, interpretants are mediating representations which fulfill “the office of an interpreter, who says that a foreigner says the same thing which he himself says” (CP 1.553). Interpretants mediate our knowledge and experience of the world and illuminate objects under some respect or capacity. Let us consider an example.

For my mother’s generation, it was absolutely inconceivable not to vaccinate their children. Not because they believed in vaccines more than we do now, but because no one even thought of forming an opinion on these delicate issues, which were delegated to a series of experts (doctors), who truly knew the subject. In the contemporary world, where a culture of conspiracy (see Leone 2016) accompanies a general distrust of others and an uncontrolled amount of information circulating freely on the internet, people have started to think that doctors – pharmaceutical companies’ partners in crime – are hiding some fundamental information about the harmfulness of vaccines because they draw an economic advantage from vaccinating children. Thus, a rather large movement of parents who have decided not to vaccinate their children has emerged, exposing them to enormous risks. But what do these parents know about vaccines? Does the knowledge based on which they decide not to vaccinate their children come directly from the objects? Have they ever been in a laboratory? Have they ever looked through a microscope? Have they ever read a scientific medical essay? Absolutely not. Their knowledge about vaccines comes from previous knowledge circulating in the open space of the non-scientific community, with all the manipulations and naiveties that characterize it. Where the scientific community of experts has shown that vaccines do not pose a real health risk, dozens of cases contradicting this idea circulate on Facebook, on non-institutional websites often not managed by doctors, and on social networks. Many people today decide to believe these sources rather than those of the scientific community.

Here is an example of what Peirce was saying: our knowledge of the world is formed by knowledge that comes from objects, and by elements that come from previous knowledge circulating in the open space of the community. Therefore, knowing is to exercise expertise on the signs circulating in the community and to epistemically evaluate them. For this reason, in my opinion, doing semiotics is to appraise our knowledge and experience (cf. Paolucci 2017), exactly as we appraise a house or a good when we want to buy it, to determine the right value and pay the right price. Not all information circulating about vaccines is of the same level and has the same value: semiotics consists in appraising this information. Semiotics is an appraisal on the values circulating in the community, an assessment on the interpretants that constitute the lifeworld. After all, the interpres (from which “interpretant” derives) was originally precisely the mediator, the one who ensured the passage of the good for a correct value.

According to historians of language, the word interpres originally refers to one who mediates a transaction, one whose good offices are necessary for an object to change hands … The “interpres” thus ensures a passage; simultaneously, he is careful to recognize the exact value of the transmitted object and assist in the transmission to ensure that the object passes from one hand to another intact. (Starobinski 1974: 23, my translation)

The interpretant is then exactly an interpres that allows passing through a series of mediations, starting from a specific configuration of values internal to one domain to another configuration of values internal to another domain. “Interpreting” means translating a system of signs into another heterogeneous system of signs, transitioning from one domain of the lifeworld to another heterogeneous domain, between which a mediation is constructed. What is at stake is a thought of passage and mediation between domains internal to the lifeworld (Serres 1972; Souriau 1943), and, through Peirce’s thought, it is useful to conceive semiotics as a science of appraisal and mediation: by denying that we possess the ability to intuitively know things, in fact, we deny that we are able to access reality directly, without the mediation of a whole series of previous knowledge that represents the background of our perception of the world (cf. Basso Fossali 2017; Latour 2012; Paolucci 2017, 2020; Paolucci et al. 2023).

This world of interpretants, this realm of previous knowledge that we cannot bracket using a method or through phenomenological reduction, but which we must inhabit through semiotic appraisals, certainly resembles a semiotic lifeworld. With Lebenswelt, Husserl (1970 [1936]) was indeed thinking precisely of that set of previous knowledge representing “the universally known,” “the horizon of a simply imperfect knowledge” which is sufficient “for the praxis of pre-scientific life,” and upon which science not only relies, but which it purifies through a “logical-objective” paradigm.

Is not the life-world as such what we know best, what is always taken for granted in all human life, always familiar to us in its typology through experience? Are not all its horizons of the unknown simply horizons of what is just incompletely known, i.e., known in advance in respect of its most general typology? For prescientific life, of course, this type of acquaintance suffices, as does its manner of converting the unknown into the known, gaining “occasional” knowledge on the basis of experience (verifying itself internally and thereby excluding illusion) and induction. This suffices for everyday praxis … There has never been a scientific inquiry into the way in which the life-world constantly functions as subsoil, into how its manifold of prelogical validities act as grounds for the logical ones, for theoretical truths. And perhaps the scientific discipline which this life-world as such, in its universality, requires is a peculiar one, one which is precisely not objective and logical but which, as the ultimately grounding one, is not inferior but superior in value. But how is this completely different sort of scientific discipline, for which the objective sort has always been substituted up to now, to be realized? (Husserl 1970 [1936]: 123–124)

Peirce’s semiotics is a response to this question by Husserl. However, despite the apparent consonances, these two “lifeworlds” – the semiotic Lebenswelt and the phenomenological Lebenswelt – are actually different. Husserl’s Lebenswelt is indeed irreducible to the knowledge and language of science, it is based on perception and has its roots in intuition.

The idea of objective truth is predetermined in its whole meaning by the contrast with the idea of the truth in pre- and extrascientific life. This latter truth has its ultimate and deepest source of verification in experience which is “pure” in the sense designated above, in all its modes of perception, memory, etc. These words, however, must be understood actually as prescientific life understands them; thus, one must not inject into them, from current objective science, any psychophysical, psychological interpretation. And above all – to dispose of an important point right away – one must not go straight back to the supposedly immediately given “sense-data,” as if they were immediately characteristic of the purely intuitive data of the life-world. What is actually first is the “merely subjective-relative” intuition of prescientific world-life. (Husserl 1970 [1936]: 124–125)

In contrast, Peirce’s semiotic Lebenswelt is grounded in his pragmatism and the corresponding need to fix beliefs inside the lifeworld using the “scientific method of fixing belief” (CP 5.410). It is discursive and categorical, not pre-logical and pre-categorical, as it is founded on anti-intuitionism and the semiotic primacy of discourse over perception. To shed light on all these points, it is worthwhile to read the first question of Peirce’s first anti-Cartesian essay, where through the demonstration of the non-existence of that intuition so fundamental to Husserl’s Lebenswelt, these themes are masterfully clarified in just a few lines.

3 A semiotic lifeworld: Peirce, Kant, Husserl

4 Semiotics and phenomenology, “telling” and “showing”: Peirce, Husserl, Heidegger

According to Peirce, a sign is a representamen that stands for its object (relation of Secondness), taking its place and illuminating it “under some respect or capacity” (relation of Firstness). However, the light shed by the sign on the object depends on a “something” (relation of Thirdness), which is neither the subject nor the interpreter, but the interpretant, that regular set of previous knowledge that interprets the world before the interpreters do. Peirce’s semiotics teaches us that a representamen can present an object only through the mediation of another representamen that represents it under a different respect. A representamen can thus present something and bring it forth as a phenomenon only by referring it to another mediating representation that says “that a foreigner says the same thing which he himself says” (cf. CP 1.553). For something to be manifested in its presence and illuminated under a certain aspect (form of visibility), it is necessary for it to be referred to other interpretant signs, that is, to previous or subsequent knowledge in the absence of an object, which say that the object is “such and such” (form of sayability), even if this is not true.

Hence the semiotic structuring of Peirce’s phenomenology (phaneroscopy): what comes into consciousness can only do so by representing itself through representamina. A representamen can present an object and bring it forth as a phenomenon only by representing it through an interpretant sign, which inherently possesses a discursive essence (it “says”). And it is precisely through this discursive essence, projecting onto the object a series of previous knowledge obtained in its absence (interpretants), that the sign is able to illuminate its object under a certain respect. Every presentation always passes through interpretant representations. Thus, Peirce’s celebrated anti-intuitionism consists precisely in this: every presentation is always a re-presentation (or mediated presentation), since there are no pure presentations, or presentations immediately connected with their object, as are, for example, intuitions. This is why phenomenology, which deals with presentations, always refers to intuitions, whether sensible or categorical. Unlike phenomenological intentional consciousness, which sees the object in its appearing, semiotic intentionality can only illuminate the object by referring it to a further representation, which takes place through a mediating representation that says something about how the sign makes its object visible. The interpretive nature of semiotics for Peirce is essentially “discursive” and not “observational,” “re-presentative” and not “presentative”: where Husserlian-Heideggerian phenomenology sees,^[5] Peircean semiotic phaneroscopy says, and it is only through the form of saying that it can show something.

Of course, we are fully aware of the significant differences between the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger, as well as Husserl’s explicit rejection of paragraph 7 of Being and Time. We are also fully aware that it is primarily the phenomenology of the early Husserl – before the formulation of the Lebenswelt – that is radically based on the idea of intuition. However, what interests us here is the primacy of perception over discourse, of vision over enunciation, which seems to us to unite, at least on this point, the positions of Husserl and Heidegger if compared to Peirce’s one.

This is why this semiotic revolution, this properly semiotic transformation of phenomenology which defines what presents itself through the semiotic structure of what is represented through representamina, determines first and foremost a primacy of the “sayable”^[6] over the “visible.” In order to manifest and come into presence, phenomena must inherently refer to a third element, the interpretant, which by its nature possesses a discursive essence: it is because the interpretant says something about its object that the first sign can show it through the mediation of this saying, and never directly in the unmediated vision of an intuition (primacy of Thirdness over the relations of Firstness and Secondness).

Let us consider an example. Why can Priam decide to bring the Trojan horse containing the Greek warriors devised by Odysseus inside the walls of Troy? The Trojan horse is a sign that stands in place of an object and illuminates it under a certain respect or capacity (“the Greeks have retreated”). As such, it conceals the object and takes its place, telling a story that stands in place of the real world (in reality, the Greeks are merely well-hidden). But the horse can tell this story and illuminate the world it replaces under that light (“the Greeks have retreated from battle”) only because previous knowledge directs our cognitions and interprets the world before the subjects, structuring perceptions of the lifeworld, which are anything but “intuitive.”^[7] In Greek culture, it was customary to leave a gift to the gods when retreating from battle, and it was believed to bring misfortune if this was not accepted: this is why Priam brings the horse inside the walls of his city, after a complex “reasoning from signs.” His lifeworld is constructed and perceived through customs and through the interpretants that illuminate Odysseus’ horse under a certain aspect. It is in this sense that within the semiotic lifeworld, the “discursive” takes primacy over the “perceptual,” the “saying” over the “showing”: interpretant signs first and foremost have a discursive structure (they “say”), and through this same discursive structure, they make things visible. This is what Peirce calls the primacy of Thirdness over Firstness and Secondness relations: while the sign illuminates the object it replaces, the interpretant “says that someone else says the same thing which he himself says” (CP 1.553), and it is only because the interpretant “says” certain things (“when retreating from battle, one leaves a gift to the gods”) that the sign can show the world under a certain respect and draw a series of inferences through a “reasoning from signs” (“the horse is a gift to the gods, so the Greeks have left”).

This leads to another important consequence regarding the relationship between phenomenology and semiotics.

Although both Peirce, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty^[8] speak of a “science of phenomena” and give the very same definition of the discipline, Peirce’s phenomenology is profoundly different from that of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. For all four of these authors, phenomenology studies the phenomenon in its manifestation and in its coming into presence, but the way in which this same “manifesting” and “coming into presence” is thought about is profoundly different. In order the stress the difference between phaneroscopy and phenomenology in the clearest way possible, without building a straw man, in this section, we will deal especially with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s positions. While European phenomenology is indeed based on showing “itself in itself, the manifest” (Heidegger 1927: 51), Peircean phaneroscopy is instead based on a complex relationship between forms of visibility and forms of sayability: something presents itself and can be seen under a certain respect only because it is referred to the sayability form of another interpretant sign, which says something about it, even if this is not true. Far from being a “return to the things themselves,” Peirce’s phenomenology is the establishment of an open space of masking that opens up to a game of credentials, in which what manifests itself claims to be one thing, but may well be lying. Hence its semiotic structure, since semiotics studies “everything that can be used in order to lie” (Eco 1975: 17).

If phenomenology operates for presentations through intuitions, which are representations directly connected with their object that make it visible in its truth (in its coming into presence, in its unhiddenness, a-letheia),^[9] phaneroscopy operates for representations through representamina, which are representations mediately connected with their objects that can always be used to lie. What manifests itself, in Peircean phaneroscopy, is always a sign, and a sign conceals its object by taking its place and referring it to another sign that says some things about that object, even though nothing guarantees that this is actually the case (cf. Eco 1975: 17). On this point, the gap between phenomenology and phaneroscopy could not be wider.

To have a science of phenomena means to grasp its objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly. (Heidegger 1927: 59)

Here is exactly what cannot be a science of phenomena for Peirce. Not only does Peirce deny the existence of direct manifestations, since all representations are mediated representations (signs); but, in addition to this, nothing can be shown without there having been an interpretant that says something, representing the condition of possibility of this “showing” and “making manifest” (see Heidegger 1927: 56).

Revealing of the difference in nature between phenomenology and phaneroscopy is the reworking of the concept of “discourse” carried out in Being and Time by Heidegger. In an attempt to illustrate the sense of the “logos” of phenomenology, Heidegger asserts that, although it is the quintessential polysemous word, the fundamental meaning of logos is that of “discourse,” and that all further translations of the term as “reason,” “judgment,” “concept,” “relation,” etc., “may still miss the fundamental signification” (Heidegger 1927: 55). However, what is the fundamental meaning of “discourse,” if “discourse (logos)” represents the “-logy” in phenomenology?

Logos, as “discourse,” means to make manifest what one is “talking about” in one’s discourse … The logos lets something be seen, namely, what the discourse is about; and it does so either for the one who is doing the talking (the medium) or for persons who are talking with one another, as the case may be. Discourse “lets something be seen”: that is, it lets us see something from the very thing which the discourse is about … The function of the logos lies in letting something be seen by pointing it out. (Heidegger 1927: 56)

Here is what a discourse is for phenomenology: a making visible, a pointing out, a form of visibility that resides within any form of sayability and makes it possible. This position is the opposite of Peirce’s. It is therefore essential to emphasize a fundamental point: the semiotic Lebenswelt is based on an antilogos that refers to a phaneroscopy rather than to a phenomenology, as the logos of phenomenology seems to imply the primacy of “showing” over “saying,” of the phenomenological “visible” over the phaneroscopic “sayable.” Hence our anti-phenomenological stance in favor of a semiotic Lebenswelt founded on the primacy of “saying” over “showing,” which – perhaps not surprisingly – we find in identical form within the foundations of structural linguistics as described by Gilles Deleuze in his essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” with which we conclude our investigation.

5 Structuralism, phaneroscopy, lifeworld: Deleuze, Peirce, Merleau-Ponty

In an essay that forms the foundation of structural epistemology, Gilles Deleuze (1973) first identified a very general criterion by which structuralism is recognized. While attributing the origin of structuralism to linguistics, not only to Saussure, but also to the Moscow and Prague schools, Deleuze hastened to clarify that although structuralism subsequently extends to other disciplinary domains such as psychoanalysis (with Lacan), anthropology (with Lévi-Strauss), epistemology (with Foucault), or literary criticism (with Barthes), it does not merely import methods equivalent to those that have yielded good results in language analysis. Instead, this development is fundamentally due to a constitutive problem of structural epistemology, more precisely a problem of object and perspective, concerning what a discipline “sees” when it “looks” at something, what it can recognize in the things it observes.

There is good reason to ascribe the origin of structuralism to linguistics: not only Saussure, but the Moscow and Prague schools. And if structuralism then migrates to other domains, this occurs without it being a question of analogy, nor merely in order to establish methods “equivalent” to those that first succeeded for the analysis of language. In fact, language is the only thing that can properly be said to have structure, be it an esoteric or even non-verbal language. There is a structure of the unconscious only to the extent that the unconscious speaks and is language. There is a structure of bodies only to the extent that bodies are supposed to speak with a language which is one of the symptoms. Even things possess a structure only in so far as they maintain a silent discourse, which is the language of signs. (Deleuze 1973: 170–171)

This idea has nothing to do with Barthes’ linguocentrism or Lotman’s notion of language as the primary modeling system, both of which placed the model of verbal language at the center of every semiotic system. It is a different story here. Deleuze is not saying that every structure must be based on the model of language and that even non-linguistic systems must be based on the structure of linguistic ones. Instead, he is saying that there is no structure except for that which is language, and therefore every language is essentially a structure and therefore a structure by its very essence “speaks,” meaning it possesses a discursive essence, not a perceptive or presentative one. This is his method for moving beyond phenomenology through structural semiotics (see Deleuze 1968, 1984: ch. 3). It is his method of exiting from

the idea of an original experience, a first complicity with the world which for us would form the basis of being able to speak about it, and would make the visible the basis of the enunciable (phenomenology, the “World speaks,” as if visible things already murmured a meaning which our language had only to take up, or as if language backed on to an expressive silence). (Deleuze 1984: 54)

Exit phenomenology. Exit Merleau-Ponty’s “world speaks”: this is the first fundamental watchword of a structuralist-based epistemology. Every time a primacy of the perceptual level is advocated, and thus of the “visible” over the “sayable,” of the “perceptual” over the “discursive,” this refers to a constitutively phenomenological approach. As Visetti notes with great clarity:

The primacy of perception can only imply the primacy of a perceptual sense whose description evidently conditions the possibility of recognizing elsewhere, on other grounds, the “same” modes of constitution: a thesis that correlates with the idea that one is situated within a framework where phenomenology plays the role of a transition or mediation from which one cannot break free. (Visetti 2004: 5, my translation)

Therefore, structuralism, which is constitutively founded on the primacy of the “discursive” over the “perceptual,” of the “saying” over the “showing,” of the “re-presentation” over the “presentation,” inherently positions itself outside a phenomenological tradition. It is no coincidence that the great post-structuralist French thinkers, from Deleuze to Foucault to Derrida, used structuralism precisely in a strong anti-phenomenological key to surpass the positions of Merleau-Ponty and the early Sartre, who were the guiding lights of the philosophical generation with which they were engaged in an open polemic.^[10]

Indeed, for Husserl, as for Merleau-Ponty, there exists a pre-categorical moment, essentially perceptual and experiential, that forms the foundation of meaning and all higher-order cognitive activities. Their Lebenswelt inherits this pre-categorical, pre-logical dimension, whereas, according to Peirce, a phenomenon can only come into presence through the categorical relations of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, which are aptly termed “phaneroscopic categories.” Moreover, the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty is founded on a constitutive “form of visibility” embodied in phenomenological intentionality that sees the object in its manifestation. For example, consider the intensive use made of the metaphor of light, which renders the entity visible in its coming into presence.

Thus, when Deleuze tells us that there is no structure except for what is language, he is first and foremost asserting the primacy of the discursiveness of “saying” over the visibility of “showing,” the categorical primacy of structure over the phenomenological and pre-categorical complicity between the body and the world, which would constitute a sensible and perceptual “visible” foundation for the enunciable. This entails the reversal of the primacy of perception over other higher-order cognitive activities. As we have seen, this position was precisely the one advocated by Peirce in the essay “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” where semiotics was founded precisely on the reversal of the primacy of the aesthetic over the logical, of the “perceptual” over the “discursive,” of the “presentative” over the “re-presentative.” The central move of Peirce’s essay was, in fact, to “reduce all kinds of mental action to a single class of modifications of consciousness,” represented by valid inference (see CP 5.264–5.317), and characteristic of “reasoning from signs.” Indeed, beyond the possible immediacy of emotion, perception, feeling, and sensation, Peirce was able to find a single form of relation that was constitutively logical, that is, semiotic, since for Peirce logic was nothing but a part of semiotics.

This was Peirce’s way of stating something that many began to articulate only many years later, namely that there is semiosis even in perception, and thus the semiotic guides our perceptual and aesthetic processes from the very first sensory impressions, which it pervades and informs through its singularities. However, the way Peirce said that there is semiosis in perception was completely different from how it has been articulated since. It has now become commonplace to emphasize the perceptual, and, more generally, sensorimotor and kinesthetic grounding of every meaning effect, in order to construct a continuity linking perception and language, thereby founding semiosis on a phenomenological syntax of the sensible. Peirce’s position, however, was profoundly different: if there is a continuity between any kind of cognitive activity and if there is meaning even in perception, it is because the universe of the sensible and the perceptual (aesthetic) operates in the same identical way as the “conceptual” (logical) one. This “same identical way” is the semiotic, which is essentially categorical, so that semiotics is a discipline that interweaves relations with the logic of relations and the phaneroscopy, with their relations of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. The semiotic Lebenswelt is thus logical and categorical and defines a primacy of “saying” over “showing,” whereas the phenomenological Lebenswelt is pre-logical and pre-categorical and is defined by a primacy of “showing” over “saying.” As Sonesson stresses:

To Peirce perceptual reality itself is made up of signs, and in this capacity it may also contain Dicisigns (i.e. propositions). To Husserl, on the other hand, the perceptual world is pre-predicative (or ante-predicative, as Merleau-Ponty has accustomed us to say). It is certainly not itself made up of signs or representations in any other sense. The world of perception, in fact, is the primary stratum of the Lifeworld, the world that precedes every other experience. (Sonesson 2017: 117)

Due to its dual foundation in structural linguistics and pragmatism, semiotics has placed at the core of its interests the relationship between the “sayable” and the “visible,” between forms of sayability and forms of visibility. This was in a sense its destiny, given that the Indo-European root of the word ‘sign’ – sak – simultaneously means ‘to say’ and ‘to show’.^[11] Modern semiotics, with its dual interpretative and structural nature, emerges precisely from the articulation and declination of these two constitutive etymological dimensions of its object. More precisely, modern semiotics has founded its epistemological enterprise under the banner of the primacy of the “sayable” over the “visible,” of the “saying” over the “showing,” in a strongly anti-phenomenological key and with the aim of reformulating from the ground up a theory of the phenomenon. It is therefore not a matter of “moving away from phenomenology,” but rather of moving away from a certain type of phenomenology, in order to construct another phenomenology based on semiotic foundations (phaneroscopy), with its own lifeworld.

If we take, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, which in its own way is very attentive to the signs and innovations introduced by structural linguistics, we see that the structure speaks only because “things” speak through it, passing through a fundamental complicity between body and world that constitutes the visible as the very basis of the enunciable.

In Merleau-Ponty (1964: 204), indeed, things speak because there is a pre-categorical experience in which we witness the “birth of meaning or a wild sense, an expression of experience through experience that clarifies the special domain of language.” It is only because this space of pure presentation exists that meaning finds itself to be

the integral of all the differentiations [… in which] the whole landscape is overrun with words as with an invasion, it is henceforth but a variant of speech before our eyes … And in a sense, as Valéry said, language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 155)

Where Deleuze tells us that every experience is a language, Merleau-Ponty tells us that every language is an experience, wildly original and pre-categorical. Where Deleuze tells us that experience arises only through meaning (through language, through structure), thus finding the condition of possibility of any experience in semiotic processes, Merleau-Ponty instead tells us that meaning arises thanks to experience, an original and wild experience placed at the very foundation of sense. Where structuralism tells us that meaning is given through differential relations, Merleau-Ponty tells us instead that it is the integral of all differentiations, which is precisely the opposite process, resolving and nullifying differences by reducing them to variations. Indeed, it is well known that, in mathematics, differential relationships between elements in reciprocal determination are resolved through the integral that defines the curve in their vicinity, with the integral being nothing other than the opposite and resolutive process of every differentiation. The integral resolves differences and makes the reciprocal determination relationships between the differential elements disappear.

Moreover, worth noticing in Merleau-Ponty’s text is the singular reference to the “voice of things.” Already Derrida (1967b) noted how every phenomenology harbors within it a privileged relationship between voice and phenomenon, since both are founded on the same self-guarantee of a presence they continuously seek and never cease to find. To this properly phenomenological coupling, Derrida (1967a) then opposed a sui generis concept of “writing” presented as a trace, that is, as a sign that stands in for a nonexistent or always absent impressor, and very rightly noted how Peircean phaneroscopy had nothing to do with the phenomenon of phenomenology, but rather with this semiotic absence that comes to presence as a reference to something else.^[12] In this way, Peirce’s phaneroscopy clearly defines the impossibility of a wild, original presentation that is not already deferred in a relational and differential structure (in Peirce, every presentation is always deferred toward the light proper of another interpretant and referred back to it).

In Merleau-Ponty, it is indeed only because there exists a pre-categorical space of emerging in which things emerge wildly without necessarily having to be re-presented through interpretants that they have a voice and “speak.” In contrast, in Peirce, nothing emerges pre-categorically: every phenomenon is always the incarnation of all three phaneroscopic categories, and nothing is able to present itself without passing through the mediation of an interpretant which says that what it says is the same thing said by someone else, under another aspect. The two positions could not be further apart: for phenomenology, it is because things present themselves through a pre-categorical experience that they have a voice and “speak”; conversely, for phaneroscopy, it is because objects are re-presented through a saying that they can come into presence and be “seen.”

Thus, the union of structuralism and Peircean phaneroscopy gives rise to the interpretative paradigm in semiotics (Eco 1975; Paolucci 2010, 2020, 2021; Violi 1997). A semiotic lifeworld is structured by interpretants and relations with which we are in structural coupling and which we must inhabit by appraising them, as they represent the background of our perception of the world.