ABSTRACT
Eero Tarasti explores the complex relationship between existentialism and semiotics as his theme in Chapter 5. He uses the term ‘existentiality’ to describe a ‘fundamental metalanguage’ concerned with human ‘“being” and “existing”’ that emerged especially in Germany from the 18th century. Where existentiality posits the puzzle of human existence as the crucial problem, in semiotics ‘the prevailing trend has been to deny the existing subject’. Tarasti explores the make-up of Heidegger's Dasein – Dasein incorporates ‘the reality that we learn to know’ due to its resistance to our ‘subjective ideas of it.’ Is it possible to study Dasein ‘in its dynamic primary essence’ in semiotic terms? Can we create a semiotic of the ‘mind seen from inside’? The author introduces the idea of a ‘zemic’ model (‘emic’ plus ‘z’ to convey movement) involving a series of moments of sublimation taking place between dimensions of Dasein – ‘body, person, praxis, and values’. These movements between levels of the interiority of Dasein are susceptible to a semiotic approach, he proposes. It is indeed possible to existentialize semiosis and vice versa. ‘Yet’, he argues, it is too early to know in which ‘direction this will lead us’.
