THE SUBJECT OF SEMIOTICS

by Kaja Silverman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1983

An attempt to synthesize linguistic philosophy, literary criticism, cinematic structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and more: too dense, too abstract, too all-inclusive--but too intellectually rich to be ignored. Silverman (prof. of ""Film and Women's Studies"" at Simon Fraser U.) seems to have started out in a less ambitious vein--her original title was Semiotics: A Methodological Guide--but fortunately and unfortunately she was not content with surveying the work of the major (and mostly French) ""semiologists,"" Barthes, Benveniste, Derrida, Lacan, LÉvi-Strauss, Metz, et al. She begins modestly enough with the early history of semiotics (the science, if it is that, of signification) and the pioneering contributions of Saussure and C. S. Pierce. But before long she sketches out her sweeping thesis that ""Signification cannot be studied apart from discourse, discourse from subjectivity, or subjectivity from the symbolic order""--and ""the symbolic order"" ultimately means the whole human (or at least Western) world, upon which Silverman has revolutionary designs. The ""subject"" of her punning title is grounded in and constituted by discourse, which cannot be understood without reference to the unconscious and preconscious, which brings up a long exposition of Freudian (mainly from The Interpretation of Dreams) and Lacanian models of subjectivity. This in turn raises some very large semiotic issues: the distance between being and signification (""irreducible"" in Freud and Lacan), the dominant ways that the ""paternal signifier"" organizes the unconscious (the threat of castration and all that), and perhaps most important, the compulsory ""identification of the subject with sexually differentiated representations"" (e.g., the child's internalizing the image of the same-sex parent at the end of the Oedipal crisis). Finally Silverman convincingly discusses the treatment and manipulation of the subject by the classic cinematic text, and suggests, not so convincingly, that the strategies outlined in Barthes' S/Z can both alter our relationship to texts and, as needed, liberate us from them. Grimly technical and jargon-ridden in spots (Silverman uses ""foreground"" as a verb), but a solid, challenging essay.

Pub Date: May 1, 1983

ISBN: 0195031784

Page Count: -

Publisher: Oxford Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION