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Page 39
any text is uttered by somebody according to his/her actual intention, and this original intention was motivated by a Dynamic Object (or was itself the Dynamic Object).
It is true that for Peirce the Dynamic Object can never be attained in its actual individual identity but is known only through the Immediate Object, and it is as an Immediate Object that the representamen offers it to further interpretations. Peircean semiotics could even be compatible with a radical Berkeleyan hypothesis: the alleged Dynamic Object can even be a mere figment produced by God and projected by Him upon our mind. If perception isas it is for Peircesemiosis, then even at the original moment of our perceptive acquaintance with the external world the external world becomes understandable to us only under the form of an Immediate Object. For Peirce, when the sign is produced the Dynamic Object is no more there (and before the sign was produced it was not an object at all). What is present to our mind and to the semiosic discourse is only the Immediate Object to be interpreted by other signs. But the presence of the representamen as well as the presence (in the mind or elsewhere) of the Immediate Object means that in some way the Dynamic Object, which is not there, was somewhere. Being not present, or not-being-there, the object of an act of interpretation has been.
Moreover, the Dynamic Object that was, and which is absent in the ghost of the Immediate One, to be translated into the potentially infinite chain of its interpretants, will be or ought to be. The quasi-Heideggerian sound of this statement should not mislead us: I am simply repeating with Peirce that "an endless series of representations, each representing the one behind it [and until this point Derrida could not but agree with this formula], may be conceived to have an absolute object as its limit" (1.339). Here it appears something that cannot find a place within the deconstructive framework: outside the immediate interpretant, the emotional, the energetic, and the logical oneall internal to the course of semiosisthere is the final logical interpretant, that is, the Habit.
The Habit is a disposition to act upon the world, and this possibility to act, as well as the recognition of this possibility as a Law, requires something which is very close to a transcendental instance: a community as an intersubjective guarantee of a nonintuitive, nonnaively realistic, but rather conjectural, notion of truth. Otherwise we could not understand why, given an infinite series of representations, the interpretant is "another representation to which the torch of truth is handed along" (1.339). 6

 
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