ABSTRACT
It is difficult, however, to precisely identify Pickstock’s understanding of what such semiotic nihilism as she opposes entails, perhaps because this is also the case with Derrida to whom she is mostly referring. It is crucial however at this time that the functioning of the concept is made clear, as keeping a form of it in play6 in a manner dissimilar from Pickstock will be a crucial theme of certain parts of this chapter. I previously identified the Nietzschean notion of the radical instability of the sign and this is the basic concept which, at this point, it is important to identify in itself, outside of its exclusively Nietzschean context, before articulating the possibilities for subsuming such a semiotic nihilism within a Christological metaperspective. Only through articulating what I hold to be the fundamental tenets of a semiotic nihilism can a proper context be provided from both my reading of Pickstock’s rejection of it and my maintaining of it within the economy of a semiotics indebted to Barth.
