Massimo Leone
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3636095 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Massimo Leone |
| NOMBRES | Massimo |
| APELLIDO | Leone |
| FIRMA | LEONE M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Turin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8144-4337 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 84 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 78 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 84 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2002 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Balancer l’échelle
La balance, d’instrument de mesure, devient dans cet essai le paradigme sémiotique du jugement et de la vérité. Depuis la psychostasie égyptienne jusqu’à la justice aveugle moderne, elle incarne la tension entre visible et invisible, poids et valeur, corps et esprit. Chaque culture redistribue les fonctions de juger, mesurer, croire : en Égypte, le fléau traduit la bureaucratie du sacré ; en Grèce, il objective le destin ; à Rome, il s’abstrait e…
Upliving
This article explores the conditions of meaningfulness in contemporary societies through a dialogue between Western and Chinese semiotic traditions. It starts from a paradox: although meaning saturates today’s semiotic environment, lived experience is increasingly felt as meaningless. Rather than treating this as a psychological or economic failure, the article frames it as a semiotic disconnection. Meaningfulness is defined not as purpose or tel…
Les normes assiégées
Cet article explore les transformations contemporaines de la légitimité judiciaire à travers une lecture sémiotique de l’architecture du palais de justice, en particulier celui de Milan. À partir de l’exemple du procès Ruby et du siège symbolique organisé en 2013 par des députés proches de Silvio Berlusconi, le texte montre comment l’espace du droit, historiquement sacralisé, est de plus en plus soumis à la logique médiatique du populisme et à la…
Caras Idénticas. Una Trayectoria Semiótica
Este artículo explora el uso poético de los espejos en la literatura argentina, centrándose en el cuento “La cara” de Silvina Ocampo y ampliando el análisis a obras de Macedonio Fernández, Julio Cortázar y Jorge Luis Borges. Los espejos se examinan como símbolos que reflejan e interrogan la identidad tanto literal como metafóricamente, situándolos dentro de una tradición exclusivamente argentina distinta del uso típico de los espejos en la litera…
O futuro no rosto
This article analyzes the cultural semiotics of mathematics as a language based on human cognition, but often used as a biased rhetoric. Instead of merely structuring reality, it attributes commensurability and precision to ideological domains. It focuses on the mathematical measurement of the body, especially the head and face, practices which, since the Enlightenment, sought to objectify racist prejudices. Facial measurement aimed to define bea…
Wearing the Veil in the Web
In the digital era, the meaning of different kinds of veil, including the hijab, undertakes significant transformations due to the interaction between laws, norms, everyday practice, and digital technologies. At the same time, the digital sphere intensifies the manifestation of diverse cultural expressions, including veiling practices, leading to new trends, meanings, and layers of complexity. Through the lens of the semiotic of culture, this con…
Aspects of AI semiotics
« Vérifictions » naturelles
L’article développe le concept de « vérifiction » afin de déconstruire et mieux comprendre la relation entre la connaissance empirique de la réalité « naturelle » et sa représentation dans le langage. En prenant l’exemple de quelques cas limites liés par une sémantique similaire (un poème de Christian Morgenstern qui « invente » une étrange créature se promenant sur son nez ; le livret parodique d’un zoologiste allemand sur une espèce récemment d…
The Right Face of Food
The article questions the relationship between the face and food. The face is, theoretically speaking, an affordance that one recognizes in the environment when it presents itself as endowed with meaning; this explains the origin, in anthropological, evolutionary, and cognitive terms, of folkloric traditions that assign a face to food, a correct direction to its handling, or that even associate its shape and fiber with entire cosmologies, as in t…
Sacred Foe
This essay aims to summarize and explore two issues that, in the exegetical and representational traditions of the biblical text, have triggered a myriad of semiotic intelligences. First, the nature of Cain’s face at the moment of the sacrifice refused him by the Lord, a face variously interpreted as angry, sad, dejected, depressed, dark. Second, the nature of the sign imposed by God on Cain following Abel’s fratricide. After exploring Jewish and…
The Legal Semiotics of the Digital Face
Bandeiras nacionais e retórica política
This study explores the semantic and symbolic complexity of flags in contemporary culture. Discussing specific examples in Italy, it analyzes how a variety of contexts employ flags, showing their socio-political, communication, and cultural connotations. It uses semiotic theories to describe the relation between flags and their meanings in different situations, highlighting the ambiguity inherent in these symbols and their role in expressing nati…
Semiotics of the black box
This article critically analyses the semiotic pathways through which the new aura of algorithmic images is constructed, an aura which stems not so much from what they represent or from how it is represented but from the halo of mystery surrounding the very productive genesis of such images. Even their creators, from their super-technological laboratories, claim that they cannot fully grasp their emergence from artificial intelligence. Analysing t…
Technology and Sacrifice
This paper investigates the complex relationship between technology, religion, and sacrifice, positing this last term as a pivotal concept for understanding the evolution and impact of technological advancements. Through a detailed examination of various cultural and religious frameworks, it explores how artificial intelligence and other modern technologies both challenge and redefine traditional notions of the sacred and the profane. By analyzin…
Introduction to “The visage as text”
This brief text introduces the main themes and topics of this collection of articles on “The visage as text: physiognomy, semiotics, and face reading from antiquity to artificial intelligence,” emphasizing the historical continuity of interest in the face as a surface to be scrutinized, investigated, and studied in order to know the individual’s intimacy or future. It points out the intertwining of semeiotic knowledge, which aims at capturing clu…
Plaidoyer pour un Prosopocène
Les masques médicaux qui se sont imposés comme dispositif pour contrer la contagion de COVID-19 affectent lourdement la présentation et la perception du visage, en en altérant radicalement la phénoménologie et la sémiotique, et en en réduisant la singularité. La production culturelle globale a souvent réagi à ces contraintes inédites, soulignant l’importance éthique de l’intégralité et de la singularité du visage contre toute tentative de fragmen…
A Tia Pequena contra Marie Kondo
Este artigo explora a interação entre práticas de consumo e crenças religiosas. Utilizando o exemplo pessoal da “Tia Pequena”, que acumulava objetos, examina-se como valores religiosos e culturais influenciam a maneira como as pessoas consomem e preservam bens materiais. Analisa-se ainda a ideologia subjacente a esses padrões de consumo, relacionando-os com a doutrina cristã e a semiótica religiosa e comparando-as com ideologias de consumo contem…
The Spiral of Digital Falsehood in Deepfakes
The article defines the research field of a semiotically oriented philosophy of digital communication. It lays out its methodological perspective, pointing out how the fake has always been at the center of semiotic research. It traces the origin of deepfakes back to the conception of GANs, whose essential semiotic workings it expounds on. It enucleates the specificities of the digital fake, especially in the production of artificial faces. It rev…
Sémiotique et innovation
L’article présente d’abord un bref état des lieux relatif aux potentialités de la sémiotique en tant que discipline d’aide à l’innovation. Suit la description et l’analyse d’une pratique innovante spontanée : celle d’un agent de police qu’on voit, à un grand carrefour de la ville de Manille, transformer la gestualité codée associée à sa fonction de contrôle du trafic en une véritable danse à la Michael Jackson, qui resémantise de manière parfaite…
O falso como vírus
O “falso” é um elemento central nas ciências naturais, nas ciências sociais e nas humanidades. Também é fundamental na sociedade, na economia, na política e no direito. Em última análise, é a principal força por trás da criatividade e fantasia dos artistas. Muitos estudos e investigações foram dedicados ao falso. No entanto, as novas tecnologias de comunicação digital estão mudando drasticamente o cenário. Alguns dos fenômenos mais perturbadores …
On Muzzles and Faces
The essay investigates the anthropological concept of personhood from the point of view of the dialectics between two fundamental elements of the socio-cultural, linguistic, and semiotic construction of the self-identity of the human species: on the one hand, the human face and, on the other, the non-human muzzle. After demonstrating that their semantics is contrastively articulated in all Indo-European languages, and after showing that such cont…
El presente, la identidad y lo falso
“Lo falso” es un elemento central en las ciencias y las humanidades. Sin embargo, las nuevas tecnologías digitales de comunicación están cambiando drásticamente el escenario. Algunos de los fenómenos más inquietantes de las sociedades actuales, desde la “posverdad” hasta las noticias falsas, desde las teorías de la conspiración hasta lo falso profundo, se originan en la encrucijada entre invenciones tradicionales y nuevos simulacros. Los enfoques…
Sutures taxidermiques
Au début de la période que l’on appelle moderne, l’exploration et la colonisation européenne du monde soulevèrent un problème à la fois cognitif et communicationnel : comment transmettre au public du Vieux Continent l’idée de la nature exotique que l’on découvrait dans les « Indes » orientales et occidentales ? Confronté à cette question, le discours de voyage européen de la première modernité déploya toute sorte de signes, textes et discours cen…
Critique sémiotique de l’enseignement numérique
Plan :Introduction1. Critique des pratiques générales du numérique1.1. De la dépendance numérique à la sensibilisation numérique1.2. L’hypertrophie numérique pendant le confinement1.3. Le traumatisme subreptice de l’enseignement en ligne1.4. L’urgence d’une considération sémiotique2. La spatialité comme condition fondamentale de l’enseignement2. 1. La centralité sémiotique de l’espace dans l’enseignement2. 2. Un réseau d’attentions2. 3. La spatia…
Semiótica do espelho digital
Os novos espelhos digitais e as imagens que eles devolvem e com as quais frequentemente despertam desejo e consumo diferem dos espelhos analógicos, aqueles que Umberto Eco considerava estar fora da ampla gama da semiótica. Os espelhos digitais são na verdade telas que simulam espelhos, por isso já “mentem” em sua função refletiva, mas podem mentir ainda mais graças a novos formatos e processos de espelhamento digital, como as selfies e os filtros…
Representing Transcendence
The double function of representation as “standing for” and “making present again” is explored in two case studies of ancient Egyptian cult statues and medieval Christian eucharistic transubstantiation. The experience of the “real presence” of the transcendent accomplished by ritual action is, in both cases, mediated by regimenting metasemiotic texts that proclaim and justify sacramental ontologies of transcendent realities that provide, in turn,…
Longing for the past
Coined in 1688 by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer to designate a pathological longing for distant homeland, the word “nostalgia” was soon rearticulated temporally, to refer to a lost epoch one yearns for as one's home. Nostalgia is not a new topic for semiotics. Emotion essentially stemming from absence, it epitomizes the semiotic mechanism: semiosis is the ontological result of something staying for something else, but nostalgia is the emotional …
Rituals and Routines
The article proposes a semiotic comparison between the phenomenological structure of rituals and routines, and claims that they share the same features of repetition through time, impossibility of change, unavailability of choice, and transcendental conception of origin. If a modern, structural conception of meaning based on alternative is adopted, both rituals and routines can be considered as meaningless. However, if the non-structural, pre-mod…
The semiotics of the anti-Covid-19 mask
The pandemic spreading of the COVID-19 virus has led to the global need to introduce, often by law, the medical face mask, which can undoubtedly be considered as "the object of 2020." In a few months, most human faces around the world in the public space, but also often in the private space, have been covered with various kinds of protective masks. Very soon, these objects have become the centre of several discursive productions, going from medic…
Wrapping Transcendence
After pinpointing the semiotic mechanism of relics, this essay highlights the danger of their being turned into fetishes with reference to the Tractatus Garsiae , a hilarious medieval parody that wittily uncovers the semiotic proximity between the collection of fetishized relics and that of fetishized money. In subsequent sections I point out how reliquaries have been adopted as an antidote to the fetishizing of relics and explain how that works …
The Semiotics of the Medical Face Mask
After a concise survey of the state of the art on the semiotics of the mask and on studies in humanities and social sciences about medical face masks, the essay provides anecdotic evidence about differences in the semiotics of medical face masks in Europe and in the ‘Far East’, especially Japan, China, and Korea; it proposes a semiotic grid for decoding the phenomenology and meaning of the medical face mask; it concludes with some general observa…
Introduction
Introduction: Studying the ‘facesphere’
To be or not to be Charlie Hebdo
The social sciences have mostly focused on the formation of social opinions from a semantic point of view: given a certain semantic field, interviews, statistics, and other analytical instruments are commonly deployed in order to map the distribution of views, their evolution, their conflicts and their agreements. Socio-semiotics, social semiotics, and the other semiotic branches that bear on social inquiry have contributed to the effort by provi…
Begging and belonging in the city
Citizens develop routine spatial enunciations through which they “domesticate” both the intensity of transition and the extension of distance implied by moving across a city and smooth out the frontiers between environments of belonging (e.g. home) and environments of non-belonging (e.g. the streets). Yet urban “accidents” constantly threaten the impermeability of such routine spatial enunciations. Beggars represent, from the point of view of cit…
The semiotics of religious space in Second Life®
Scholarly research on the religious dimension of Second Life® can be conducted with reference to several elements: ties between the religious dimension of Second Life and that of the “First Life” (an approach privileged by the sociology and the psychology of religion); the transcendent value inherent in the creation of an alternative reality (an approach favored by the philosophy of religion); the enunciation of a “virtual” religious dimension th…
Semiotics of the black box
This article critically analyses the semiotic pathways through which the new aura of algorithmic images is constructed, an aura which stems not so much from what they represent or from how it is represented but from the halo of mystery surrounding the very productive genesis of such images. Even their creators, from their super-technological laboratories, claim that they cannot fully grasp their emergence from artificial intelligence. Analysing t…
Mona Lisa's emoji
Emojis are presently thus customary in digital communication that they have become part of the communicative habits of most users of social networks. Representing an attitude of hilarity towards a certain statement by ending its verbal transcription with an emoji “smiling to tears” is not the same as smiling or laughing to tears when uttering the same content as an oral statement. The major structural difference between an emoji in digital conver…
Silence Propaganda
Societies should be analyzed not only from the point of view of what they talk about but also from the point of view of what they are quiet about. Areas of silence in the semiosphere vary across cultures and history and stem from a complex interaction of historical circumstances and social agencies. Implicit norms of taciturnity are often codified into explicit legal frameworks, whose enforcement, though, substantially relies on state and governm…
Smashing Idols
The evolution of monotheism within a polytheist culture is strictly connected with the institution of the dialectics between “monolatry” and “idolatry.” On the one hand, one divinity among many becomes the center of an increasingly exclusive cult; on the other hand, this exclusivity unfolds in parallel with the stigmatization of any alternative veneration. The establishment of monolatry is substantiated both in sacred texts, which designate the o…
Transcendence and Transgression in Religious Processions
This article analyzes the phenomenology and semiotics of religious processions. On the one hand, these rituals succeed in congregating several individual agencies, thus helping them to obliterate the frontier between the sacred environment of the place of worship and the profane environment of the space surrounding it. Consequently, in religious processions, subjects experience an enlargement of the environment of the sacred that encourages them …
Signs of the Soul
Taking as a point of departure the description and depiction of the anima ragionevole e beata (sensible and blessed soul) in Ripa’s Iconologia , this essay inquires, from a semiotic point of view, into the labyrinthine development of the Christian imaginary of the soul, considered one of the sources of the cultural semiotics of modern and contemporary subjectivities. Placed between the Greek model of visual representations of psyché , incarnated …
My schoolmate
The article examines the role of sounds, and particularly of music, as expressive means of protest that stemmed from the disputed 2009 Iranian presidential election. On the background of the cultural history of music in Iran, semiotic analysis dwells on slogans, on the classic anti-establishment song ‘Yār-e-dabestānī-e-man’, as well as on underground and diaspora contemporary Iranian music. The article concludes by characterizing the musical prot…
The sacred, (in)visibility, and communication
Dialogue between religions cannot merely be dialogue between doctrines. As soon as religions are considered not only as abstract systems of beliefs but also as embodied practices of faith, their aesthetic dimension becomes prominent. Dialogue therefore involves the sphere of sensibility. How do believers of different faiths weave the fabric of religious experience? Through which senses, signs, and forms of signification and communication does it …
Mala Cara
Para discutir de manera razonable de alteridad, primero hay que definir la normalidad. La normalidad de los patrones que determinan la percepción y la representación de rostros humanos tiene que definirse a la vez en relación a la neurofisiología humana de la percepción de rostros, resultado de la evolución biológica de la especie, y a la influencia de una cultura visual sobre ella. La semiótica estructural y, en particular en análisis plástico d…
La dématérialisation du sacré paradoxes de la religion à l’ère numérique
La pensée du XX e siècle a mis l’accent sur l’opposition entre spirituel et matériel. La religion a été étudiée comme produit socio-économique ou comme instinct. Mais la pénétration du matérialisme dans la sphère irrationnelle de la croyance a laissé quelque chose d’inconnu. Notre réflexion se focalise sur ce que nous n’avons pas encore compris du notre sentiment religieux à partir de la dématérialisation des relations humaines, façonnée et encou…
The clash of semiotic civilizations
Why was Greimas’ theoretical proposal so divisive? Why did his disciples worship the new analytical method, while his detractors harshly rejected it? The article claims that the strength, as well as the weakness, of Greimassian semiotics consists in positing a rational way to determine the range of meanings of a text. Semiotic interpretive methods that are more aware of the diachronic dimension, such as Eco’s interpretive semiotics or Lotman’s se…
Nature and culture in visual communication
The neurophysiology of vision and cognition shapes the way in which human beings visually “read” the environment. A biological instinct, probably selected as adaptive through evolution, pushes them to recognize coherent shapes in chaotic visual patterns and to impute the creation of these shapes to an anthropomorphic agency. In the west as in the east, in Italy as in Japan, human beings have identified faces, bodies, and landscapes in the bizarre…
Converting Knights
This essay compares representations of religious conversion in four Italian chivalric poems: Luigi Pulci’s Morgante , Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato , Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso , and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata . Semiotically read, they cast new light on the Catholic idea of the religious self in its development from the late Middle Ages throughout the early modern era. In this evolution, the Council of Trent represe…
Melbourne versus Sydney
Urban marketing has recently been adopting the concept, and the label, of “second city”. However, this concept requires sharper theoretical definition in order to turn heuristic. Thus far, it has been conceived in relation to an “ideology of ranking”, strictly related to the worldview of post-modern globalization. A more fruitful definition of “second cities” results from Charles S. Peirce’s idea of secondness: a city is second to another not in …
Introduction to the semiotics of belonging
The article proposes a phenomenological and semiotic theoretical framework for the intelligibility of the meaning of belonging, one of the most fundamental concepts in present-day cultures and societies. After defining belonging as a spatial enunciation that brings about 1) the frontiers of a space of belonging; 2) the consequent opposition between an environment of belonging and one of non-belonging; and 3) the relation between, on the one hand,…
Shoah and Humour
»Vielmehr bietet [der Kommentar] auf höchstem Niveau eine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Hintergründen, den Zusammenhängen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Grundgesetzes. Besseres lässt sich von einem Verfassungskommentar nicht sagen.“ Herbert Günther Staaatsanzeiger für das Land Hessen 2018 (50), 1494–1495
Boundaries and identities in religious conversion
Religious conversion revolutions the boundaries which delimit personal identity. Therefore, the main semiotic problem of mental and cultural representations of this religious phenomenon is to convey simultaneously a feeling of sameness and otherness, identity and change. In the present paper, mirrors are analysed as cultural mechanisms which enable representations to accomplish this paradoxical task. After a brief survey concerning literature on …
Religious Conversion and Identity
A Semiotic Comparison Between Mel Gibson?s The Passion of the Christ and Pier Paolo Pasolini?s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew
Sustainable Religions in Contemporary Cities
Legal Controversies About the Establishment of New Places of Worship in Multicultural Cities
Resemblance and camouflage in Graeco-Roman antiquity
In the twenty-eighth book of the Naturalis Historia Pliny the Elder claims that, if a chameleon’s left leg is roasted together with a herb bearing the same name, and everything is mixed with ointment, cut in lozenges, and stored in a wooden little box, this will bestow on those who own it a perfect camouflage. The ring of Gyges (Plato, etc.), that of Midas (Pliny), the heliotropium (Pliny), the dracontitis (Philostratus): ancient cultures abound …
The sacred, (in)visibility, and communication
Dialogue between religions cannot merely be dialogue between doctrines. As soon as religions are considered not only as abstract systems of beliefs but also as embodied practices of faith, their aesthetic dimension becomes prominent. Dialogue therefore involves the sphere of sensibility. How do believers of different faiths weave the fabric of religious experience? Through which senses, signs, and forms of signification and communication does it …
Ancient tradition and modern audacity
The article proposes a short bio-bibliographic profile of the seventeenth-century Spanish polymath Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, exposes the main contents of one of his Latin works, the Grammatica Audax (litt.: “the Audacious Grammar”), and focuses on the passages of this work that shed new light on the history of semiotic ideas. The paper dwells, in particular, on the first part of the Grammatica Audax, the Methodica, where Caramuel adopts the ling…
(In)efficacy of Words and Images in Sixteenth-Century Franciscan Missions in Mesoamerica
The semiotics of religious space in Second Life®
Scholarly research on the religious dimension of Second Life® can be conducted with reference to several elements: ties between the religious dimension of Second Life and that of the “First Life” (an approach privileged by the sociology and the psychology of religion); the transcendent value inherent in the creation of an alternative reality (an approach favored by the philosophy of religion); the enunciation of a “virtual” religious dimension th…
Rituals and Routines
The article proposes a semiotic comparison between the phenomenological structure of rituals and routines, and claims that they share the same features of repetition through time, impossibility of change, unavailability of choice, and transcendental conception of origin. If a modern, structural conception of meaning based on alternative is adopted, both rituals and routines can be considered as meaningless. However, if the non-structural, pre-mod…
Semiótica de lo bárbaro
Desde el principio del proyecto lotmaniano para una semiótica de la(s) cultura(s), el concepto de non-cultura, o de incultura, ha jugado un papel fundamental. De hecho, en el marco de la teoría de Lotman, la presencia de una dimensión de non-cultura, o de incultura, resulta imprescindible para la definición de la cultura misma. La semiótica post-lotmaniana ha profundizado el estudio de las dinámicas internas a la semiosfera cultural, pero muy rar…
My schoolmate
The article examines the role of sounds, and particularly of music, as expressive means of protest that stemmed from the disputed 2009 Iranian presidential election. On the background of the cultural history of music in Iran, semiotic analysis dwells on slogans, on the classic anti-establishment song ‘Yār-e-dabestānī-e-man’, as well as on underground and diaspora contemporary Iranian music. The article concludes by characterizing the musical prot…
Begging and belonging in the city
Citizens develop routine spatial enunciations through which they “domesticate” both the intensity of transition and the extension of distance implied by moving across a city and smooth out the frontiers between environments of belonging (e.g. home) and environments of non-belonging (e.g. the streets). Yet urban “accidents” constantly threaten the impermeability of such routine spatial enunciations. Beggars represent, from the point of view of cit…
Introduction to the semiotics of belonging
The article proposes a phenomenological and semiotic theoretical framework for the intelligibility of the meaning of belonging, one of the most fundamental concepts in present-day cultures and societies. After defining belonging as a spatial enunciation that brings about 1) the frontiers of a space of belonging; 2) the consequent opposition between an environment of belonging and one of non-belonging; and 3) the relation between, on the one hand,…
Signs of the Soul
Taking as a point of departure the description and depiction of the anima ragionevole e beata (sensible and blessed soul) in Ripa’s Iconologia , this essay inquires, from a semiotic point of view, into the labyrinthine development of the Christian imaginary of the soul, considered one of the sources of the cultural semiotics of modern and contemporary subjectivities. Placed between the Greek model of visual representations of psyché , incarnated …
Converting Knights
This essay compares representations of religious conversion in four Italian chivalric poems: Luigi Pulci’s Morgante , Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato , Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso , and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata . Semiotically read, they cast new light on the Catholic idea of the religious self in its development from the late Middle Ages throughout the early modern era. In this evolution, the Council of Trent represe…
Representing Transcendence
The double function of representation as “standing for” and “making present again” is explored in two case studies of ancient Egyptian cult statues and medieval Christian eucharistic transubstantiation. The experience of the “real presence” of the transcendent accomplished by ritual action is, in both cases, mediated by regimenting metasemiotic texts that proclaim and justify sacramental ontologies of transcendent realities that provide, in turn,…
Transcendence and Transgression in Religious Processions
This article analyzes the phenomenology and semiotics of religious processions. On the one hand, these rituals succeed in congregating several individual agencies, thus helping them to obliterate the frontier between the sacred environment of the place of worship and the profane environment of the space surrounding it. Consequently, in religious processions, subjects experience an enlargement of the environment of the sacred that encourages them …
Melbourne versus Sydney
Urban marketing has recently been adopting the concept, and the label, of “second city”. However, this concept requires sharper theoretical definition in order to turn heuristic. Thus far, it has been conceived in relation to an “ideology of ranking”, strictly related to the worldview of post-modern globalization. A more fruitful definition of “second cities” results from Charles S. Peirce’s idea of secondness: a city is second to another not in …
Longing for the past
Coined in 1688 by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer to designate a pathological longing for distant homeland, the word “nostalgia” was soon rearticulated temporally, to refer to a lost epoch one yearns for as one's home. Nostalgia is not a new topic for semiotics. Emotion essentially stemming from absence, it epitomizes the semiotic mechanism: semiosis is the ontological result of something staying for something else, but nostalgia is the emotional …
Semiotic of pretext, semiotics of pre-text
Semioticians obsessively talk about texts and their analysis. Yet, in the history of semiotics, few texts have been analyzed. One might even argue that semiotics has never analyzed texts. Indeed, semioticians, including the fathers of the discipline, have rather turned texts into pretexts: what mattered in their analysis was not to bring about a hermeneutic result (for instance, changing the way in which a community receives the significance of a…
Wrapping Transcendence
After pinpointing the semiotic mechanism of relics, this essay highlights the danger of their being turned into fetishes with reference to the Tractatus Garsiae , a hilarious medieval parody that wittily uncovers the semiotic proximity between the collection of fetishized relics and that of fetishized money. In subsequent sections I point out how reliquaries have been adopted as an antidote to the fetishizing of relics and explain how that works …
Regimes semióticos do pertencimento nas metrópoles contemporâneas
O artigo propõe um quadro teórico fenomenológico e semiótico para a inteligibilidade do sentido do pertencimento, um dos conceitos mais fundamentais nas culturas e sociedades atuais. Depois de definir o pertencimento como uma enunciação espacial que traz 1) as fronteiras de um espaço de pertencimento; 2) a oposição consequente entre um ambiente de pertencimento e um de não-pertencimento, e 3) a relação entre, por um lado, o sujeito da enunciação,…
Philosophy (66 obras) · Semiotics (49 obras) · Sociology (48 obras) · Epistemology (43 obras) · Art (36 obras) · Linguistics (34 obras) · Aesthetics (28 obras) · Philosophy (25 obras) · Political science (24 obras) · Humanities (20 obras)