New Book: The Self as a Sign, the World, and the Other

How can semiotics help us understand subjectivity?

The question of subjectivity concerns the close and the distant, the self and the other, the other from self, and the other of self. It is thus the question connected to the question of the sign. It calls for a semiotic approach because the self is itself a sign; its very own relation with itself is a relation among signs. The Self as a Sign, the World, and the Other critiques subjectivity in terms of the “material” that the self is made of, that is, the material of signs.

Susan Petrilli highlights the scholarship of Charles Pierce, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Mary Boole, Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Claude Levi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Morris, Thomas Sebeok, Thomas Szasz, and Victoria Welby. Included are American and European theories and theorists, evidencing the relationships interconnecting American, Italian, French, and German scholarship.

About the author

Susan Petrilli is the seventh Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America and professor of philosophy of language and semiotics at the University of Bari, Aldo Moro, Italy. She is the co-author, with Augusto Ponzio, of Semiotics Unbounded and author ofSignifying Understanding, Sign Crossroads in Global Perspective, andExpression and Interpretation in Language, among others.

This information has been first published here.