ABSTRACT
Smell is often regarded as the least important of humans' senses. For Descartes, the senses were physical, bodily attributes that were entirely secondary to the working of the intellect, to "ideas". One of the legacies of the European Enlightenment was therefore an idealization of the senses deemed to be involved with language and thought (sight and sound) and a relegation of the lesser senses that involved the body (touch, taste and smell). The humanist subject that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe did not smell, neither actively smelling the environment as part of his philosophical investigations, nor giving off odours as a result of manual work. This chapter looks at the relation of smells to linguistic domains, asking how to start to incorporate a sense of smell into humans' semiotic inventory. It explores how to start to bring smells together into a broader posthumanist semiotic assemblage.
