The Self as a Sign, the World, and the Other

This book features the full scope of Susan Petrilli's important work on signs, language, communication, and of meaning, interpretation, and understanding. This work of remarkable depth takes up intensely debated topics, exhibiting in their treatment of them what Petrilli admires-creativity and imagination. The theory of identity being advocated in this book will provide the reader with an aid to appreciating the identity of the theorizing undertaken by Petrilli in her confrontation with an array of topics. She expertly combines analytic precision and moral passion, theoretical imagination and political commitment. Semiotics is associated with a capacity for listening. This capacity is also the condition for reconnecting to and recovering the ancient vocation of semiotics as that branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs or symptoms. The pragmatic aspect of global semiotics studies the impact of language or signs on those who use them, and looks for consequences in actual practice. Petrilli theorizes that the task for semiotics in the era of globalization is nothing less than to take responsibility for life in its totality. Book jacket.