ABSTRACT
The emergence of SEMIOTICS* as the study of signs, signification and signifying systems, must be seen within the broader context of the language-haunted nature of contemporary thought. Although language has been an object of philosophical reflexion for millennia, it is only recently that it has come to constitute a fundamental paradigm, a virtual “key” to the mind, to artistic and social praxis, and indeed to human existence generally. Central to the project of a wide spectrum of twentieth-century thinkers-Wittgenstein, Cassirer, Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida-is a concern with the crucial shaping importance of language in human life and thought. The overarching meta-discipline of semiotics, in this sense, can be seen as a local manifestation of a more widespread “linguistic turn,” an attempt to reconceptualize the world “through” linguistics.
