ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that particular sign through which we each identify ourselves—that is to say, the sign “self”. Human sign processes are endowed with a capacity for opening to the other, for creativity and critical interpretation, for continuous verification and revision. Therefore, the propensity for questioning interpretations and habits, for interrogating certainties and beliefs is in the nature of the human sign as we are describing it. The self subsists, acts, expresses, and communicates to the extent that it relates intercorporeally with other selves, other body-signs in the great semiosic network where bodies and signs cannot be separated if not by abstraction, for reasons of analysis. A specific characteristic of the self considered as sign matter, as a self becoming other than what it was becoming in open-ended semiosic fluxes, is its capacity for metasemiosis—that is, the capacity to use signs to reflect on signs.
