Foundations of Semiotics

Вводятся базовые понятия семиотики: понятие коммуникативного акта, понятие знака и понятие знаковой системы. Знак определяется как разновидность цепочки моделей объекта. Подробно рассматривается структура простой знаковой системы - шлагбаума, на примере которой показывается, как работают введенные базовые семиотические понятия, в том числе синхроническое и диахроническое описания объекта. Во второй главе ставятся проблемы описания эволюции знаковых систем, намечаются этапы усложнения коммуникативных систем, строится эволюционная теория происхождения языка

Explicates the Semiotic Paradigm and devotes a chapter to each subparadigm, such as Philosophy of Semiotics; Experimental Semiotics; Search for Invariant Patterns; Theoretical Semiotics; Applied Semiotics; Mathematical Semiotics; and New Ways of Thinking - New Worldviews.

La sémiotique de la religion est appelée à un exercice paradoxal d’introspection.  Il faudra reconnaître les présupposés religieux de la sémiotique même ;  sans pourtant parvenir à une paralyse de la démarche sémiotique, il faudra s’interroger sur le rapport entre conceptions du sens religieux internes aux communautés et conceptions extérieures des analystes.  Est-il toujours vrai que comprendre une religion se réduit à en saisir le sens ? N’y a-t-il peut-être une dimension fondamentale dans toute expérience religieuse, consistant exactement à s’abandonner à l’ignorance du sens ? À passer de la quête de ce qui signifie à la fusion avec ce qui est ?  La sémiotique ne pourra répondre à ces questions qu’en récupérant ses liens profonds avec l’une des disciplines qui, en définitive, furent à ses origines : la philosophie.

There is no meaning without manifestation. The materiality of expression must channel the potentiality of human thought into perceptible ontology. If in most existential domains this constraint seems unproblematic, in religion it often turns into paradox. Religious imaginaries abound with ideals of totality, completeness, and infinitude. Yet, revelation too, meant as the human grasp of the exceptional ontology of transcendence, requires expression. Every expression, though, as linguists and semioticians of all backgrounds assert, results from exclusion. Transcendence that signifies is therefore diminished transcendence, totality that withdraws from itself in order to create a space of finitude, a space that language can inhabit.
But religious language rarely renounces the aspiration of integrity: bridging, through semiosis, the ontological abyss between the absolute quiet of perfect transcendence and its signs for the world, for the existent, for life. To different extents, all religious traditions strive for a paradoxical implosion of semiosis. They design formulae, rituals, and practices whose oxymoronic purpose is to signify the return of signification to its imperturbable origin. This paradoxical semiotic goal generates two tensions: a positive one, wherein religious discourse aims at perfectly signifying the totality of its sacred referent through the elaboration of a total interpretant; a negative one, wherein religious discourse pursues the same objective through the elimination of every interpretant. The first tension gives rise to the mystical parole, the second, to the iconoclastic practice. Both are intrinsically doomed to fail, but both animate through their energy the diachronic evolution of religious cultures.
Through case studies stemming from different religious contexts and epochs, the paper seeks to determine the characteristics of this dynamic, its meaning in the frame of a general semiotic philosophy of religion, its interactions with the history of semiotic ideologies and, above all, what it reveals on the nature of humanity.

The proprioception of space is a major matrix of cognitive and conceptual metaphors. Scholars too often resort to spatial metaphors in order to “place” and “visualize” their theoretical insights. Semiotics is not an exception: on the opposite, given the abstractedness of the semiotic investigation, semioticians have often coated their theories in spatial imaginaire. Peirce’s semiotics could not be conceived without its triangular insistence, the superposition of a representamen upon an object through an interpretant, diagrams, and graphs; Lotman turned space into a meta-language, but was himself thinking semiotics in spatial terms (the semiosphere being the epitome of spatial theorization); as for the trend of semiotic scholarship that develops from Saussure through Hjelmslev to Greimas and beyond, the preeminence of “spatial thought” (perhaps a consequence of the “diachronic primacy”) is evident since the first model of sign, wherein the signifier and the signified are situated in a specific, hierarchic topology. The paper will claim that not only each school of semiotics, and perhaps each semiotician too, refer to a characteristic spatial imaginaire, but also that this theoretical topology interacts with what could be called an “ontological ideology”: in each sociocultural group, at a given moment of its history, a certain conception of being is given preference over the others, generating a spatial imaginaire.
The paper will therefore seek to retrace the intellectual trajectory of Algirdas J. Greimas’s semiotics in relation to one of these ontological ideologies and its spatial figure: depth. Greimas’s theory on- and model of- meaning became international acclaimed — the paper will argue — because successfully intercepted an ontological ideology predominant across societies and cultures in the 1960s and 1970s: according to it, what matters does not lie at the surface of things, but in their depths; in order to reach value, one must dive into this depth, equipped with a suitable methodology, and unveil the essential that is hidden behind several layers of inessentiality. Greimas’s “generative path” [parcours génératif] epitomized the theoretical triumph of such “topological ideology”. With this hypothesis in the background, the paper will seek to explain why the Greimasian method became so acclaimed, why it was subsequently so denigrated, and why and in what guise it should be rediscovered in present-day international semiotics.