This paper introduces and defends a way to translate Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations from a semiotic standpoint. This turn builds on Semiosic Translation. 102–130), a framework that advances the interaction of sign systems as a necessary point of departure in the translation process. From this vantage, the key term “Bild,” is analyzed, explained and retranslated into English. This term evinces high levels of complexity and variability that cannot be captured by traditional linguistic translations. In (...) applying a semiotic approach, any iteration of Bild is characterized as reflecting the author’s intentions at a given moment. This semiotic reading seeks to provide semioticians, translators, and philosophers with new conceptual tools leading to an understanding of translation as a systemic operation not confined to the realm of subjective interpretation. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 225 Seiten: 353-382.

The need for a comprehensive semiotic understanding of poetic translation is at the heart of the present paper. This task is framed in terms of a multidisciplinary theoretical framework termed semiosic translation that I apply in this article to the translation of Holocaust poetry. This type of poetry is characterized as a distinct sign system that poses a number of challenges to both translators and semioticians. One of the most conspicuous problems is the ineffability of nothingness, (...) which is particularly evident in the poetry of Paul Celan. Building on the notions of abductive inference (Charles S. Peirce) and rule-following (Ludwig Wittgenstein), I introduce a method for the translation of two key poems Schwarze Flocken (‘Black Snowflakes’), corresponding to Celan’s early period, and Weggebeizt (‘Worn down,’ a poem written in 1963). The semiotic method applied shows that the underlying Firstness of Holocaust art (an anti-semiotic sign system) is the driving force behind Celan’s poetry. It is also suggested that iconicity and indexicality are not peripheral semiotic processes but central elements to elucidating how the translation across sign systems takes place. (shrink)

In this response paper, I trace the origins of semiosic translation and explain why Jia’s interpretations are theoretically problematic. I also demonstrate that the view of translation endorsed by Jia is untenable from a cognitive perspective, since both perception and action are affordances of the living organisms and hence are not restricted to the “thinking mind” within a Lotmanian semiosphere. Finally, since translation is not a special case of semiosis, I show that semiosic processes, and (...) not individual signs, are the source of all types of translations. (shrink)

In this article, I introduce a semiosic translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The theoretical framework is Semiosic Translation, a theory that combines Peirce’s interpretive semiotics and Wittgenstein’s notions of rule-following and complex-fact. I seek to show that this approach is particularly adroit at the task of making the sometimes cryptic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein accessible to readers. To support this assertion, I compare and analyze several canonical translations of the Tractatus with possible semiosic translations. The (...) results show that Wittgenstein’s work throughout its different phases displays a continuity that reaches a genuine abductive peak in the Philosophical Investigations. This abductive, usage-based turn is, nonetheless, announced in the Tractatus in terms of a quest for semiotic accuracy. (shrink)

RESUMO O presente artigoapresenta reflexões sobre o conceito de “imprevisibilidade” advindas a partir do exercício de tradução para a língua portuguesa da obra Os mecanismos culturais imprevisíveis1, último livro publicado por Iuri Lótman. Mais do que uma explicação completa e definitiva das acepções sobre os trabalhos imprevisíveis da cultura, esboçamos nestes escritos fundamentos de interesse para a constituição de processos semiósicos de nossas particulares preocupações. Dessa forma, apresentam-se para as análises relações imprevisíveis em processos relacionados à ciência e à tecnologia, (...) à arte e à figura do estrangeiro.ABSTRACT This article reflects upon for the concept of unpredictability based on the translation into Portuguese of The Unpredictable Workings of Culture, Yuri Lotman’s last published book. More than a complete and definitive explanation of the meanings of the unpredictable works of culture, this article outlines the fundamentals that interest the constitution of semiosic processes that concerns us. Thus, unpredictable relationships in processes related to science and technology, art and the foreign figure are presented for the analysis. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a new type of semiotic translation in the context of Audiovisual Translation Studies (AVTS). To that end, a set of formulaic sequencesbestowed of pragmalinguistic value (hedging strings) is analysed. It is argued that the semiotic analysis of conversational features in English may contribute to facilitate their pedagogical exploitation in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. This analysis builds theoretically on a semiotic translational framework termed Semiosic Translation (and its subset, (...) class='Hi'>Semiosic Subtitling) predicated upon three types of translation: (i) Metaleptic translation; (ii) indexical translation; and (iii) translation as dynamic discontinuity. Th e translational rationale thus arrived at is deemed to account for what it is that binds together linguistic signs with other sign systems. (shrink)

A human being is the simultaneous composite of several different levels of being, from atomic and subatomic to the level of complex social interaction, and these levels are nested within the individual hierarchically (lower levels giving rise to higher levels, etc.). One of the most important and influential approaches developed in the history of science has been that of systems theory and systemic thinking, in which the different levels of the hierarchy, and the interactions between those levels, are considered simultaneously. (...) Although this model provides a comprehensive view of biological being, the transition from one level to the other is not well defined in it. Uexküll and Pauli (Advances: Journal of the Institute for 417 the Advancement of Health 3:158–174, 1986) suggested that semiosis is the translator of the events from one level to the other. From a psychological point of view, a myriad of semiotic events happen inside an individual, and it has been suggested that among other semiotic events, inner speech plays an important role in mediating personal agency. Dialogical theories of the self, Jungian psychology and hypnosis research evidence show that there is a semiotic multiplicity in human agency and consciousness, and that these multiple streams are all converge to a central semiotic singularity. I argue in this paper that by taking a biosemiotic point of view, human ‘agency’ may be defined as the ability of an individual to direct the incoming and internal streams of semioses and the ability to create an integrative and superordinate new stream of semiosis in addition to the upwardly and downwardly component ones, and how such a view might open a new door for research into the concept of human ‘personality’ and ‘agency’. (shrink)

Metalinguistic operations signify understanding and translation, specified in Jakobson’s varieties of six language functions and his three types of translation. Both models were first presented in the 1950s. This article is rooted in Jakobson’s models in connection with Peirce’s three categories. Bühler’s three functions with qualitative difference anticipated, perhaps not accidentally, Jakobson’s distinctions indicating qualitative difference within literary forms and structures as well as other fine arts. The semiotic discovery, criticism and perspective of elements and code-units settle the (...) numerical differences as well as the differences in realistic messages and conceptual codes. Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation is updated in vocal translation, which deals with the virtual reality of opera on stage, reaching a catharsis of the operatic mystique. The word-tone synthesis of opera (or semiosic symbiosis) will demonstrate the typological unification of verbal and nonverbal languages. (shrink)

The basic problem affecting humanitarian law today remains that of its implementation. As of now, requests made by individuals before national courts to assess the compatibility of certain acts with international humanitarian law failed. The present case study and commentaries focus on the decision of a German civil court sitting Bonn to deny the victims of a NATO air raid the right to sue Germany and claim compensation for alleged violations of international humanitarian law.

Leopoldo Zea was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Though in English-language scholarship Zea is known primarily as a historian of ideas, his philosophical producti...

This is a translation of "Socialite et argent", a text by Emmanuel Levinas originally published in 1987. Levinas describes the emergence of money out of inter-human relations of exchange and the social relations - sociality - that result. While elsewhere he has presented sociality as "non-indifference to alterity" it appears here as "proximity of the stranger" and points to the tension between an economic system based on money and the basic human disposition to respond to the face of the (...) other person. Money both encodes and effaces sociality, both designates and disguises social relations. It arises from the way that needs and interests are manifested in exchange relations, in what he calls the "interestedness" of economic life. But interests are always already cut through by the fact that being is always "being with others". Being is always "inter-being". Interestedness is always confronted by disinterestedness, that is, by a sociality marked by the "goodness of giving", attachment to and concern for the poverty of the other person. Levinas concludes with a discussion of sociality and justice, posing questions about the tension between the demand to respond to an Other immediately before me and at the same time to respond to the demands of an other Other (the third person) who also invites a response. (shrink)

‘Language and End Time’ is a translation of Sections I, IV and V of ‘Sprache und Endzeit’, a substantial essay by Günther Anders that was published in eight instalments in the Austrian journal FORVM from 1989 to 1991 (the full essay consists of 38 sections). The original essay was planned for inclusion in the third (unrealised) volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings. ‘Language and End Time’ builds on the diagnosis of ‘our blindness toward the apocalypse’ that was advanced (...) in the first volume of The Obsolescence in 1956. The essay asks if there is a language that is capable of making us fully comprehend the looming ‘man-made apocalypse’. In response to this, it offers a critique of philosophical jargon and of the putatively ‘objective’ language of (nuclear) science, which are both dismissed as unsuitable. Sections I, IV and V introduce this core problematic. The selection of this text for inclusion in this special journal issue responds to present-day realities that inscribe Anders’s reflections on nuclear science and the nuclear situation into new contexts. The critique that ‘Language and End Time’ advances resonates with the way in which the (undemocratic) decisions of a few companies and individuals are shaping the future of life on earth. At the same time, the wider stakes of Anders’s turn against the language employed by (weapons) scientists are newly laid bare by the realities and politics of climate change and fake news. In this new context, the language of science is all too readily dismissed as if it were a mere idiom that can be ignored without consequence. It is against the backdrop of a future that is, if anything, more uncertain than at the time of Anders’s writing, that the essay’s reflections on popularisation, the limits of language and the nature of truth gain added significance. (shrink)

Michael Heidelberger's exhaustive exploration of Fechner's writings, in relation to current issues in the field, successfully reestablishes Fechner'...

In 1813 Isaak von Sinclair published a poem entitled “The New Acquaintance.” It recounts a meeting between himself, his friend Friedrich Hölderlin, and one other unidentified guest whom Sinclair awaited with keen anticipation. Because of Hölderlin’s well established friendship with Hegel it has been assumed in the past that the unknown acquaintance was in fact Hegel. However, at the time to which the poem refers, Hegel was a relatively obscure and unknown figure with no reputation. If we are therefore to (...) accept that the poem does indeed allude to Hegel then we must assume that Sinclair, as early as 1813, had recognized Hegel’s genius and wanted retrospectively to associate his name with the newly rising star of German philosophy. In that case we must ask why he refrained from mentioning Hegel by name or at least making the character of the unknown unambiguously clear? In translating this poem for the first time into English I offer for consideration another candidate as the “acquaintance,” namely, Wilhelm Heinse. (shrink)

In European culture the sacred and the secular have existed in a dialectical relationship. Prodi sees the fifteenth-century crisis of Christianity as opening up three paths that eroded this dualism and tended towards modernity: civic-republican religion, sacred monarchy, and the territorial churches. Important counter-forces, which sought to maintain dualism, included the Roman-Tridentine Compromise, and those forms of Radical Christianity which rejected confessionalisation outright. During the Eighteenth Century, all these phenomena tended to contribute to one of two tendencies: towards civic religion, (...) or towards political religion. The former preserved a distinction between conscience and law; the latter comprised a state religion which sought to perfect all of human nature. It was civic religion which become embodied in the early USA, alienating God from worldly power, but leaving him as the guarantor of agreements between humans. Back in Europe, Prodi tracks the relationship between the Catholic Church and the new national states. He then turns to the political religions of the Twentieth Century. Prodi concludes by emphasising that this dualism of sacred and secular power lay at the centre of Western modernity, and expresses his fears about the collapse of civic religion into political religion, especially in the USA. (shrink)

In the eleventh of his Antiquarian Letters, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing discusses a phrase from Lucian's description of the painting by Zeuxis called A Family of Centaurs: ‘at the top of the painting a centaur is leaning down as if from an observation point, smiling’. ‘This as if from an observation point, Lessing notes, obviously implies that Lucian himself was uncertain whether this figure was positioned further back, or was at the same time on higher ground. We need to recognize the (...) logic of ancient bas-reliefs where figures further to the back look over those at the front, not because they are actually positioned above them but because they are meant to appear as if standing behind.'1 · 1. The passage is in George Lessing, Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts, p. 81. Panofsky's discussion does not note that the original text of Lucian makes clear that what is described is a copy of the original painting. This means that some of the issues of misunderstanding situated by Lessing and Panofsky in Lucian's court may in principle be attributable to the copyist. This makes no difference to the conceptual thrust of Panofsky's case.—Trans. (shrink)

The processes associated with globalization have reinforced and even increased prevailing conditions of inequality among human beings with respect to their political, economic, cultural, and social opportunities. Yet-or perhaps precisely because of this trend-there has been, within political philosophy, an observable tendency to question whether equality in fact should be treated a as central value within a theory of justice. In response, I examine a number of nonegalitarian positions to try to show that the concept of equality cannot be dispensed (...) with in any adequate consideration of justice. (shrink)

At this historical moment, few terms are as charged and powerful as the omnipresent term environment. It has become a strategic tool for politics and theories alike, crossed the borders of the disciplines of biology and ecology, and left the manifold field of environmentalism. This article explores the first steps on this path of expansion, in which the term becomes an argumentative resource and achieves a plausibility that transforms it into a universal tool. It is not self-evident to describe ubiquitous (...) media, cinematic spaces, or augmented realities as environments. To understand how the term gained this plausibility, it is necessary to distinguish it from two other terms: the French milieu and the German Umwelt. When these three terms substitute one another and are used as translations, they lose their historical specificity and depth, and three different theoretical and philosophical traditions merge into indifference. Consequently, a conceptual history of the term environment and its relation to milieu and Umwelt—as well as terms such as medium, atmosphere, ambiance, and climate—can help us to understand the potentials and dangers of the term’s plausibility. In this sense, the article argues for a new perspective on epistemologies of surrounding that relate that which surrounds to that which is surrounded. (shrink)

This text gives an account of the experience of reading Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva in the form of a brief dialogue with the text. It foregrounds the writing voice’s address of a second person and the attention this address brings to the acts of writing and reading that hold the two pronouns in relation, producing at once an infinite and nonexistent distance from being to being. The dialogue observes Lispector’s insistent return to the formulation “atrás do pensamento,” which has been (...) translated into English as “beyond thought” and can also be translated as “behind-thought” or as the background of thought, in a more spatial sense. Nancy reads the translation into French, where this spatial nuance is preserved, in consultation with Lusophone interlocutors about the specificities of the Portuguese original. The dialogue interrogates the link across this dimension, the recurrence of the pronoun it in the original Portuguese version of Água Viva, and the acts of writing and reading a text that brings awareness to a living, pulsing, ongoing, and escaping instant beyond meaning that is nonetheless the cause of the address in the first place. The dialogue follows the thread of this movement as it slips out behind thought, where Água Viva meets other books attuned to the instant and in which the dialogue’s “I” feels their vitalizing effects. (shrink)

This work argues from a social-theoretical perspective for the view that every concept of 'gender' remains bound to reproduction. As every culture is interested in its continuity, it distinguishes individuals according to their assumed possible contribution to reproduction and so develops a fundamental dual classification. Subsequent gender categories are necessarily derived from this one. The conceptual and empirical arguments for this thesis are illustrated through an imagined dystopia. There I envision under what conditions a complete dissociation of the concepts 'sex' (...) and 'gender' from the old dual distinction would be possible and in what way a multiplicity of genders would be accomplished. (shrink)

This text reconstructs the Kohlberg/Gilligan controversy between a male ethics of justice and a female ethics of care. Using Karl-Otto Apel's transcendental pragmatics, the author argues for a mediation between both models in terms of a reciprocal co-responsibility. Against this backdrop, she defends the circular procedure of an exclusively argumentative-reflexive justification of a normative ethics. From this it follows for feminist ethics that it cannot do without either of the two types of ethics. The goal is to assure the evaluative (...) variety of different types of an ethics of the good without endangering the normative boundaries of a deontological discourse ethics. (shrink)

Today’s question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We c...