Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 1991"

Peirce on signs : writings on semiotic

Abstract: Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is rapidly becoming recognized as the greatest American philosopher. At the center of his philosophy was a revolutionary model of the way human beings think. Peirce, a logician, challenged traditional models by describing thoughts not as "ideas" but as "signs," external to the self and without meaning unless interpreted by a subsequent thought. His general theory of signs -- or semiotic -- is especially pertinent to methodologies currently being debated in many disciplines. This anthology, the first one-volume work devoted to Peirce's writings on semiotic, provides a much-needed, basic introduction to a complex aspect of his work. James Hoopes has selected the most authoritative texts and supplemented them with informative headnotes. His introduction explains the place of Peirce's semiotic in the history of philosophy and compares Peirce's theory of signs to theories developed in literature and linguistics. |Analyzes the wartime politics of the Allied powers concerning war crimes, showing how their decisions led to the Nuremberg trials.

A sign is just a sign

Abstract: Introduction Chapter 1. The Doctrine of Signs Chapter 2. Communication Chapter 3. The Semiotic Self Chapter 4. The Semiotic Self Revisited Chapter 5. In What Sense Is Language a OPrimary Modeling SystemO? Chapter 6. Linguistics and Semiotics Chapter 7. Toward a Natural History of Language Chapter 8. The Evolution of Semiosis Chapter 9. Semiosis and Semiotics: What Lies in Their Future? Chapter 10. OAnimalO in Biological and Semiotic Perspective Chapter 11. Clever Hans Redivivus Chapter 12. Fetish Chapter 13. Indexicality Chapter 14. Messages in the Marketplace Chapter 15. The Sign Science and the Life Science References Index of Names

Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives

Abstract: Alan Bullock's bestselling and monumental masterpiece, now in a revised Second Edition 'It is practically unprecedented to take two such monsters as Hitler and Stalin, who never met, and interweave their lives chronologically, chapter by chapter, often paragraph by paragraph, as Bullock has done...a triumph of organization, lucidity and perspective.' John Campbell, The Times 'Compulsive reading. The sweep is broad and the information concisely conveyed without any sign of pedantry...a titanic narrative history.' Zara Steiner, Financial Times 'An astonishing feat of organization, brilliantly illuminating the tragic history of the twentieth century.' Philip Ziegler, Daily Telegraph Books of the Year 'If you knew nothing about the twentieth century and were allowed one book to bone up on it, this would have to be it.' Alex Campbell, Daily Mail

Studies in language origins

Abstract: 1. Notes on contributors 2. Introduction by the editors 3. 1. A functional reconstruction of the supralaryngeal vocal tract of the fossil hominid from Petralona (by Budil, Ivo) 4. 2. A much-too-brief evolutionary history of the mammalian middle ear (by Daniel, Hal J.) 5. 3. Spatial mapping and the origin of language: A paleoneurological model (by Wallace, Ron) 6. 4. Some acoustic properties of baby-talk and the prototype effect in infant speech perception (by Davis, Barbara L.) 7. 5. Cerebral lateralization for cognitive and linguistic abilities: Neuropsychological and cultural aspects (by Chernigovskaya, Tatiana V.) 8. 6. Echolocation: An acoustic causal function. Semiotic and linguistic aspects (by Frundt, Hans) 9. 7. Further evidence of verbal and non-verbal communication between the mother and her unborn child in the womb - in support of the author's theory of the bi-modal origin of language (by Raffler-Engel, Walburga von) 10. 8. The Neanderthals: The origins of language and human consciousness? (by Jonker, Abraham) 11. 9. Motor theory of language origin: The diversity of languages (by Allott, Robin) 12. 10. Sign arbitrariness as an index of semiogenesis (by Liska, Jo) 13. 11. Language as analogic strategy: Suggestions for evolutionary research (by Foster, Mary LeCron) 14. 12. Vocal/auditory cognitive mapping, shared meaning and consciousness (by Ragir, Sonia) 15. 13. Historical motivation in the linguistic sign and its cognitive origin (by Gyori, Gabor) 16. 14. The red marbles of phonological and semantic stability through the ages (by Key, Mary Ritchie) 17. 15. The elaboration of language structure (by McArthur, Douglas) 18. 16. The use of the scenario method in the historical sciences (by Greenhood, William) 19. 17. Developments in the pongid and human motor systems as preadaptations for the evolution of human language ability (by Kien, Jenny) 20. 18. The gestural origin of language and new neurological data (by Hewes, Gordon W.) 21. 19. Memory for personal information: Have names become special? (by Burton, A. Mike) 22. Name index 23. Subject index

Philosophical hermeneutics and literary theory

Abstract: Modern hermeneutics - an introductory overview what is philosophical about philosophical hermeneutics? Kant and the aesthetics of history Metaphor as a Metaphor of understanding a word is not a sign the question of the classic.

A semiotical reflection on biology, living signs and artificial life

Abstract: It is argued, that theory sf signs, especially in the tradition of the great philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) can inspire the study of central problems in the philosophy of biology. Three such problems are considered: (1) The nature of biology as a science, where a semiotically informed pluralistic approach to the theory of science is introduced. (2) The peculiarity of the general object of biology, where a realistic interpretation of sign- and information-concepts is required to see sign-processes as immanent in nature. (3) The possibility of an artificial construction of life, hereby discussed as a conceptual problem in the present form of the artificial life project and its implied definition of life.

A Question of Survival: Nations and Psychic States

Abstract: Can there be culture without melancholia? This seems to be the central question posed by contemporary theories of representation which repeatedly associate the making of narrative with the death of the author. What dies with the author is not merely intentionality in interpretation. In its wake arises the figure of the textual sign that resists the ‘innate’ or autonomous coherence of the corpus and locates meaning on the boundaries of that loss that generates meaning, turning interpretation into an inevitable passage through the intertextual. For Derrida, the process of writing is a form of survival, or living on the borderline1 of the violence of the letter and its doubles — mark, trace, crypt. For Lacan the scenario of the birth of the ego is staged in the ‘fading’ of the signifier, as it hangs over the abyss of a dizzy assent in which, he says, we see the very essence of anxiety.2 Even Lyotard’s comic Oedipus, who refuses the melancholic moment of modernity in the postmodern condition, has finally to concede that the terror of ‘death’ in all its forms traverses the pragmatics of language games and leads him to question the social bond.3

Narration and Discourse in the Book of Genesis

Abstract: Preface Part I. A Functional Theory of Narrative: 1. Toward a functional theory of narrative 2. The functions of the sign 3. A functional definition of narrative 4. A typology of narrative functions and modes 5. The three functional narrative types Part II. The Structure of the Genesis Narrative: 6. The divine Voice and the narrative functions 7. The micro-dialogue as the matrix of the Genesis narrative Part III. Analysis of Genesis Narratives: 8. 'Who told you that you were naked?' 9. 'Where is your brother?' Excursus on sacrifice in religion and literature 10. The central micro-dialogue 11. 'Why did you say, 'She is my sister'?' 12. 'Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?' 13. 'Who then is he who was hunting game ... before you came?' 14. 'Where do you come from?' Notes Bibliography Index - authors and topics Index - Biblical references.

Canon, Syllabus, List: A Note on the Pedagogic Imaginary

Abstract: Recent critical debates have tended to generate their own controversial vocabularies, by means of which the milieu of an entire debate can be evoked with great economy, in a word or two. Such a word is "canon"-the name of a debate. I would like to begin by observing the tacit historical displacement that permits the currency of this word: the displacement of the word "classic" by the word "canon." The latter term does not now signify the same relatively uncritical regard for the great works of Western literature as its predecessor, but rather a critique of that very regard, a critique that has all but retired the word "classic" as the signifier of a precritical era of criticism itself. I foreground this simple historical observation by way of emphasizing the more important point that the word "canon" is not so much the name for a historically stable collection of texts as it is the sign of a particular crisis in the history of literary criticism within the university. For it is only within the university that the critique of the canon has currency, in the form of an ongoing debate about the syllabus, the curriculum. The critique of the canon has eventuated in many new curricular programs, from which I do not intend to dissent here. On the contrary, I would like to provide such programs with a different and better defense of their necessity. The business of this argument is not to question the necessity of curricular change but to interrogate some of the historical assumptions dictating the current program of canonical reform, and determining as well the terms by which the political effects of reform are typically represented. For the purpose of bringing the critique of the canon to a further stage of self-critique, I would summarize its program in two basic principles: (i) An analogy between the Bible and literature as forms of scripture, an analogy to which we owe the word "canon," along with the supposition that "canons" of texts possess an inherent drive toward closure, completion. The tacit effects of the scriptural analogy are continually present

The Possessed Individual: Technology and Postmodernity

Abstract: The Possessed Individual: Technology and New French Theory - Bodies without Wills: Paul Virilio's War-Machine - The Despotic Sign: Barthes' Rhetoric of Technology - Why Should We Talk When We Communicate So Well: Baudrillard Natural Cyborgs - Becoming Virtual (Technology): The Confessions of Deleuze and Guattari - Libidinal Technology: Lyotard in the New World - Cynical Aesthetics: The Games of Foucault - Epilogue: The Paris Simulacrum

Two Sign Languages in a Single Village in India

Abstract: In this paper I explore two sign languages independently employed by two isolated deaf signers in a single village in northern India. Following a suggestion by Washabaugh (1979) that languages can be placed along a continuum of “structuredness,” from “positive” to “negative,” I have compared these two languages. Languages more positively structured are relatively independent of context, complex in syntax, and have a lexicon of discrete, arbitrary, conventionalized signs. Languages more negatively structured are context-dependent, multi-channeled, and their signs have non-discrete, iconic, and ambiguous components. I have argued (Jepson, in press) that positive structuring in a language is related to the existence of a community of speakers who rely on the language as a major mode of communication. While both of the sign languages discussed here are negatively structured, one exhibits the rudiments of positive structuring, and the other does not. The existence of some degree of positive structuring in one of the languages may result from the fact that the signer’s life is strongly embedded in a set of close relationships with family and lifelong friends, who form a tiny speech community, employing his form of sign language as a relatively important mode of communication. The lack of positive structuring in the other form of sign may result from that signer’s marginal position in the village and his lack of family and close friends who can serve as a small speech community.

Knowing & Using Female & Male Signs in Dublin

Abstract: We examine two variations in the Irish Sign Language of Dublin, Ireland. Signers commonly refer to these sign varieties as “female” and “male” signs. Because of the historical link of these signs to school signs, the signers in this study were selected on the basis of age, sex, and social network. The sex of the signer seems to explain differences observed in the distributions of signers’ knowledge and use of the “female” and “male” sign varieties. We argue that the differences between women’s knowledge and use of “male” signs, and men’s knowledge and use of “female” signs result from differences in cultural opportunities to acquire full facility with both varieties.

Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time

Abstract: Sequel to History offers a comprehensive definition of postmodernism as a reformation of time. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth uses a diversified theoretical approachdrawing on post-structuralism, feminism, new historicism, and twentieth-century scienceto demonstrate the crisis of our dominant idea of history and its dissolution in the rhythmic time of postmodernism. She enlarges this definition in discussions of several crises of cultural identity: the crisis of the object, the crisis of the subject, and the crisis of the sign. Finally, she explores the relation between language and time in post-modernism, proposing an arresting theory of her own about the rhythmic nature of postmodern temporality. Because the postmodern construction of time appears so clearly in narrative writing, each part of this work is punctuated by a "rhythm section" on a postmodern narrative (Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, CortNBzar's Hopscotch, and Nabokov's Ada); these extended readings provide concrete illustrations of Ermarth's theoretical positions. As in her critically acclaimed Realism and Consensus in the English Novel, Ermarth ranges across disciplines from anthropology and the visual arts to philosophy and history. For its interdisciplinary character and its lucid definition of postmodernism, Sequel to History will appeal to all those interested in the humanities.

Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, his Critics, and their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy

Abstract: This book traces the changing attitudes towards painterly brushwork from Mannerist norms to the Arcadian classicism of eighteenth-century critics. At the centre of this history of artistic taste stands the Venetian art dealer, critic and painter Marco Boschini, who wrote a rambling, metaphoric defence of Venetian painting in 1660: La carta del navegar pitoresco (The map of painterly navigation). Pittoresco, 'painterly', serves as the title of this book because the shifting opinions on painterly brushwork are contained in its semantic history, migrating in meaning from a neutral designation of all painting ('pictorial') to a specific type of painting ('painterly' or 'picturesque'). It could be interpreted as a sign of inspired creativity and manual facility, or as a sign of showy dexterity unrestrained by learning. By means of linguistic analysis, pittoresco and related terms open up a world of cultural reference where literate art critics bring their taste in poetry and rhetoric to the least literary aspect of painting: the descriptive, ornamental or inspired form of brushwork.

Suicide as Literary Fact in the 1920s

Abstract: In the search for meaning which its conclusion provokes, a life, inevitably, is scrutinized for patterns, symbols, and general themes; it is read, in short, as a text. Suicide becomes a bloody signature on the bottom of a ragged page, the final and incontrovertible assertion of authorial control over one's own life. At the same time, however, the suicide relinquishes all future control over everything, including future interpretations of his or her life-as-text. As a Pyrrhic means of giving the planned, narrative structure of a text to life, suicide functions as an uncanny fulcrum between "meaningful" life and "meaningless" death; hence its fascination. The supreme instance of human will triumphing over cruel nature's whims is also the moment of greatest surrender to death's lack of meaning. Witnesses and analysts rush in to provide interpretation and theory. In the 1920s the problem of suicide could be said to be a crisis of genre. If suicide served as a textual marker, a sign of a tragic "Fifth Act" (as Iurii Lotman describes the function of suicide in the age, of Aleksandr Radishchev),' it could also be understood within the framework of other semiotic systems. The new "scientific" or "sociological" approach understood suicide not as something atypical and extraordinary, but as a part of what was typical of a certain kind of society. Suicide belonged to the same (no longer necessarily literary) genre as a piece of evidence, a social factum, which lent itself to incorporation into macrostatistical descriptions.2 Each particular suicide would then gain meaning only as part of a societal pattern. Russian philosophers like Nikolai Berdiaev and Simeon Frank, meanwhile, approached suicide from a slightly different, although still socially understood, point of view. For them, a suicide hovered generically between sign or symptom of societal "illness" and a kind of moral exemplum exposing the dangers of a life lived with too little philosophy, too little "meaning."3 Suicide works as an awkward joint not only between life and death, but between life and text, the latter juncture being something more than the mere product of suicide's literary history (from Cato and young Werther to Sergei Esenin and Vladimir Maiakovskii). Turning life into a kind of text is a project related to the bringing of life into a text, and both projects are perhaps equally difficult. The 1920s, when literature had to clarify its relation to revolution and the real world clamored to be admitted into all ivory towers and utopian fictions, produced a number of modernist experiments in the literary cohabitation of life and text. In 1924 Iurii Tynianov remarked on the growing tendency to read journals and newspapers as "literary facts" instead of as phenomena of everyday life.4 The shifting of "center" and "periphery" that characterizes, according to Tynianov, the generic interactions between literary and "real" worlds became a manic, high-speed obsession in the 1920s, as writers reached further and further into life for facts to make literary.

Peirce's semiotic version of the semantic tradition in formal logic

Abstract: The aim is not so much to stress the important of Peirce's formal contributions to the semantic view (Boole, Scroder, LOwenheim) in formal logic (his treatment of the quantifiers, a correct definition of validity for the sentential calculus, etc.), as to argue that Peirce's semantic trend is part and parcel of his semiotic treatment of a general theory of meaning, understanding and interpretation, a theory of how signs function which enables him to classify different sorts of signs in a natural way.

Semiosis, Marginal Signs and Trickster: A Dagger of the Mind

Abstract: A List of Diagrams and Tables - Preface - Introduction: The Terrific Sign - PART 1: DYADIC SIGNS - The Nature of Signs and the Naturalness of Objects - Numerous Signs and Natural Objects - The Myth of Polarity: A Perennial Problem of Semiotics - PART 2: TRICHOTOMOUS SIGNS - Triadic Integration of Polarities - Peirce, Pragmatics and Pyramids - Peirce's Demon Abduction: How to Charm the Truth out of Quark - PART 3: MARGINAL SIGNS - Semiotic Approaches to Higher States of Consciousness - A Semiotic of Dreams: Pragmatic Forks in the Royal Road - Semiosis as Trickster: The Laughter of Signs - Notes - Bibliography - Index

The Dialogic Sign: Essays on the Major Novels of Dostoevsky

Abstract: Contents: This book elaborates features of Dostoevsky's highly distinctive narrative art. These include his striking use of nonverbal strategies within dialogic structures, the creation of a poetics of absence, the deployment of elaborate internal modeling systems yielding a dialogic thematics, and his generating a text by means of these systems.

Occasions for Sign Use in an Australian Aboriginal Community

Abstract: Some form of gestural communication or signing has been noted to be prevalent among Australian Aborigines by European observers since writing about this people began. Indeed, at the time when Europeans first came into contact with Aborigines, the use of sign, when noted, was often a source of amazement, and led to many unfounded myths about the mysterious powers of communication Aborigines seemed to possess. In certain parts of Australia sign use is highly elaborated and can be used as a full-fledged alternative to speech. This is especially the case in the northern area of the Central Desert where, among such groups as the Waramungu and the Warlpiri it is the custom for women (but not men) to use signs in place of speech when bereaved of actual or classificatory spouse, child, or son-in-law. The period during which sign replaces speech in this way may be as long as two years in some cases. Readers interested in a detailed account of this custom are referred to Kendon (1988). However, although speech taboos may account for the complexity of signing in some areas, this must be understood as but a special elaboration within the context of a more general predisposition to use sign that seems to be widespread in Aboriginal society. How can this apparent predisposition be accounted for? What has been needed is detailed observation of the use of signs in everyday interaction, coupled with an understanding of the kinds of interaction such usage makes possible and how this tendency to communicate gesturally may relate to the use of other forms of communication. The following paper by Joan Kwek, makes a valuable contribution to an understanding of these phenomena. Although she reports a few observations first hand, and relies largely on what she has been

Cynical Power: The Fetishism of the Sign

Abstract: The representative problem of modem French thought is the problem of representation . The whole movement ofthought in France has been toward the specification of representational features not reducible to subject and object ; and then the rediscovery of energy (desire), force (differance) and power within the terms of the language paradigm itself . But, as the articles to follow all suggest, the structuralist and post-structuralist programmatic attention to representations has achieved only ambiguous insights into the power of representations as such . A synoptic review of the structuralist tradition indicates that the founding premises were never outlived and indeed that they always acted as the gravitational centre for later ventures . It is almost as if structuralism and post-structuralism together form a kind of closed universe of discourse in which questions are interesting but like Hegel's night the answers are indistinguishable . Once entered, such a 'universe is difficult to escape ; yet the postmodern project has achieved the coherence of a hermeneutical tradition with the ineluctiblity of a rite de passage . The journal has chosen the work of Jean Baudrillard as a talisman: a symptom, a sign, a charm, and above all, a password into the next universe .

Kristeva's "Soleil noir" and Postmodernity

Abstract: T he Kristevan critique of postmodernity sees literature as having become-at the level of style-a minimal, colorless writing, where death is the same as life and opposites generally slide into one another with complete indifference. The Durassian oeuvre is the prototype of such writing where madness emerges completely rationally, and meaning and feelings coalesce in trivia and profundity "without tragedy or enthusiasm" "in the frigid insignificance of a psychic torpor-the minimal, but also the ultimate sign of grief and ravishment" (Kristeva, Soleil noir 236).1 Here, the "eros" of poetic language-the "music in letters," as our epigraph says-has evaporated and given way to "a whiteness of meaning" (264). Does this Kristevan assessment truly capture something fundamental in the West's postmodern fin de siecle? This question serves as the focus of the reflection in the following pages. But rather than giving an answer to it, I intend to begin sketching out the dynamics of the issues surrounding it.

Trying to Bring literature Back Alive: The Ivory in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Abstract: the idea meant by that word).1 The "precious trickle of ivory"2 in Conrad's Heart of Darkness is such a sign—indeed one of the great signs in literature. The ivory is a product of (and a symbol of) that imperialist "idea" Marlow refers to on the Nellie (10). But (something seldom if ever discussed) the ivory is also its sign. The idea—any idea—is immate rial, merely a mental event; an event which cannot itself get out of the mind. To get out, to be transpersonal and thus enduring, the idea needs a material substitute perceptible by the senses. The ivory is the idea's substitute—its sign (as are also Kurtz's oil sketch (27) and his written Report (50)); it is these, rather than the disembodied "idea" of imperialism (in, say, the mind of Kurtz), which enter into the posses sion of other people. The artist too has his idea: all he thought that led to what he wrote. An idea which is likewise trapped in his own neural jungle; an idea which needs a material substitute that can be gotten out. The material work, his Heart of Darkness, is the substitute—his ivory. It and it alone survives as what can be weighed, bought, felt with the fingers, read by the eyes in the Sepulchral City. The immense idea that led to the ivory (like Kurtz's "immense plans" [65]), being imma terial, is lost; or, put another way, is lost in the compact, precious sign which now stands for and replaces it. The idea and its sign are not identical. Subtle and immaterial thought is utterly different from whatever coarse matter (for instance the material components of a verbal sign system) is chosen to substi tute for and model the thought. We do not think in matter; further more there is no real evidence that our immaterial thoughts are, or are entirely, words. Husserl for instance maintains that verbalization

The Figurability of the Visual: The Veronica or the Question of the Portrait at Port-Royal

Abstract: WE READ toward the end of the second part of Logic of PortRoyal this rather enigmatic title of chapter 14: "Concerning propositions in which signs are given the name of things."' The logician explains himself by a "de jure" question: When has one the right to affirm the signified thing of the sign? By this means he raises the question of the epistemic legitimacy of the conferring of a name and more precisely of its transfer, of its metaphora of the thing it names to a sign: the validity of the migration of institutional signs in the field of language. It is besides in this region of semiosis that the question is mainly raised: "for with regard to natural signs [whose paradigm is the specular image (see chapter IV part 1)] there is not the slightest difficulty" (LP-R 204). The fact that this "metaphorical" affirmation is obvious for the latter category of signs, that right is confused with fact, or that fact should establish an immediate law, this doxic immediacy, this use assumed as natural, is related to the visual, to the pregnant relationship established between the real and the figural. It is true that for all signs which show features of the specular, "the visible relationship that exists between these sorts of signs and things clearly shows that when one affirms the signified thing of the sign, one means not

Na origem está o signo

Abstract: Logic as semiotics implies, in the Peirce's point of view, a triadic structure of thought and sign, where the bipolarity constituted by the pair subject - object is overcome. Nominalism is surpassed and individualism too. Sign is broader than symbol and supposes potentiality and actuallity. Two classes of objects and two series of interpretants, each one of the least by its turn admitting a triple subdivision, give place to a logic of scientific conduct. This makes appeal to a future community whose belief corresponds to the Truth, and to a cosmologie dimension of thought that supplies with a ground to the last objectivity of knowledge and volition.

Words, Worlds, and Wishes: The Aesthetics of Somali Kinship

Abstract: Postmodern anthropology, whatever its lack of uniformity, is repeatedly said to have turned anthropologists from seeing to hearing, from worldview to worldauscultation. In the words (and vision) of Tyler (1987:171), postmodern anthropology is "the study of man-'talking.' " There is excellent ancestry for this position and few of the theorists en vogue fail to draw upon central debates in semiology and philosophy. One such theoretical interest has been to question the received wisdom, a la Saussure and Peirce, concerning what makes up a sign and the relation between signifier and signified. For anthropologists, more seasoned, perhaps, than philosophers by frequently finding the worlds of others in dissonance with their words, it comes as no great surprise that "the rhetoric of an assertion is not necessarily compatible with its explicit meaning" (Johnson 1981:xvi). While postmodernists thrive on it, most anthropologists would not be perplexed if a foreign word like pharmakon (to stay in the idiom), "through skewing, indetermination, or overdetermination but without mistranslation, permitted the rendering of the same word by 'remedy', 'recipe', 'poison', 'drug', 'philter' etc." (Derrida 1981:71). At least we would not judge that as sufficient ground for concluding that it is a "strange logic" that links the "malleable unity of this concept" with its signifier (Derrida 1981:71). I know of a great many anthropologists who, faced with similar problems, would pursue modernist lines of analysis trying to set the concept in its context, map out the range of usage, try hypotheses of possible keysymbolism, and so on. In other words, despite the flood wave of textual approaches and deconstructionist leanings, alternative modes of signification are not a primary resort in anthropological analysis. That is too bad. Questioning of conventional semiology could yield exceptional results if applied to some of the key problems in the ethnography of talking. This is particularly so in view of the problems that a particular class of foreign

Against the Fantasts

Abstract: Amongst Kant's lesser known early writings is a short treatise with the curious title Dreams of a Spirzt-Seer Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics, in which, with considerable acumen and brilliance, and not a little irony, Kant exposes the empty pretensions of his contemporary, the Swedish visionary and Biblical exegete, Emanuel Swedenborg, to have access to a spirit world, denied other mortals. Despite his efforts, it must be feared, however, that Kant did not, alas, succeed in laying the spirit of Swedenborg himself to rest once and for all, for there has arisen in our own day, and within philosophy itself, a movement of thought, if such it can be called, which, like that of Swedenborg, is founded upon an unbridled and unhealthy exercise of the imagination, and apparently believes that philosophical problems can be discussed and resolved by the elaboration of fantastical, and at times repulsive, examples; if we require a name for this contemporary pretence at philosophy, we could take as our model the Italian word for science fiction,fantascienza, and call it 'fantaphilosophy': it is my aim to show that this fantaphilosophy is a phantom philosophy. By a fantasy I mean here the purported description of some supposed occurrence which is so at odds with logical principles, the laws of nature, established knowledge, or the assessment of probabilities that we have compelling reasons for thinking it unrealisable. It follows, of course, from this definition of fantasy that no precise line can be drawn once and for all between it and the legitimate use of the imagination, which is essential to philosophy and of its very nature is for ever finding unexpected ways of expressing itself: knowing which is which, and when the proper limits of the imagination have been overstepped, is at bottom, then, a matter of educated common sense, a commodity in which fantasts are signally deficient. The causes of the growth of this fashionable imitation of philosophy are not far to seek. A preoccupation with the fantastical has always been a sign of cultural decadence: when the human mind grows weary of the real world, it takes refuge in a world of its own construction, and thus fantaphilosophy is in one respect simply another symptom of our current cultural decline; but there are also specifically philosophical causes of this particular form of decadence. One major cause is the

Nostalgia for the origin: notes on reading and melodrama in h. p.

Abstract: The “event” Derrida refers to at the beginning of “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1978,278) as a “rupture” and a “decentering” points to a moment in which Western thought ceases to be articulated around the fallacy of a transcendental signified giving to the play of language a fixed origin, a reassuring foundation, a center (1978, 280). This ‘decentering’ which both the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics and the Freudian undermining of self-presence represent according to Derrida, lies precisely in the awareness that language can bear no presence, that signs obliterate reality - rather than refer to it - in an endless chain of substitutions and deferrals, and, thus, that concepts such as “eidos,” “arch?‘, “telos”, “God” or “man” - the successive attempts by means of which Western philosophy has tried to master play, to fix meaning, to base language in fundamental ground (1978, 279) - are never present outside the very system of differences. This “decentering”, this event by means of which “the structurality of