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can shift from element to element of the universal furniture, but every element is cognitively characterized and determined only insofar as it refers to something else. |
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If we had to represent the ideal process of unlimited semiosis by a diagram similar to that used for connotation, we should probably outline something like that shown here (figure 2.4), where every content (or Immediate Object) of an expression (Representamen) is interpreted by another expression endowed with its own content, and so on potentially ad infinitum. But there is a sort of growth of the global content, an addition of determinations, since every new interpretant explains on a different ground the object of the previous one, and at the end one knows more about the origin of the chain as well as about the chain itself. A sign is indeed something by knowing which we know something more, but "that I could do something more does not mean that I have not finished it" (Boler 1964:394). |
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5. Unlimited Semiosis and Deconstruction |
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If unlimited semiosis has nothing to do with Hermetic drift, it has, however, been frequently quoted in order to characterize another form of drift, namely, that extolled by deconstruction. |
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According to Derrida, a written text is a machine that produces an indefinite deferral. Being by nature of a "testamentary essence," a text enjoys, or suffers, the absence of the subject of writing and of the designated thing or the referent (Of Grammatology, Eng. tr., 69). Any sign is "readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor consciously in |
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