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What Is Existential Semiotics? From Theory to Application

During the past fifteen years I have been elaborating a new theory of semiotic inquiry, starting from its philosophical and epistemic premises. I have called this project Existential semiotics due to its roots in continental philosophy—following the line Kant-Hegel-Kierkegaard-Jaspers-Heidegger-Arendt-Sartre-de Beauvoir-MarcelWahl—and in the history of semiotics via its various generations: classic, structuralist/post-structuralist, and postmodern thinkers. In fact this enterprise has led me almost to the borderlines of semiotics, since the new configuration of knowledge that I propose has become so strongly philosophical and so close to certain hermeneutical and phenomenological approaches, that it may be at first difficult to see its link to the whole tradition of semiotic studies. As to the latter, my new theory does not aim to show that " classical semiotic thought" has become outdated; rather, it is still valid, but within the limits of a new, more encompassing theory. Coming from Claude L6vi-Strauss's structuralism ( I was his only Finnish student, having studied with him in Paris in 1973—1975, then doing research in Brazil in 1976 following his ideas) and from the Paris School of semiotics founded by Lithuanian born semiotician and linguist Algirdas Julien Greimas, I remain faithful to those classic authors. On the other hand, I am forging an independent theory that can no longer be confined within the framework of Parisian semiotics. In the semiotic context and tradition I would call my theory a "neosemiotics". It is no longer a " post-" phenomenon ( like poststructuralism or postmodernism) but something new, in that it purports to represent 21st-century thought and, as a philosophy of our time, engages with challenges of the present era. My new theory is not a return to "existentialism" , as its title might suggest. Rather, I am reconsidering and rethinking the foundations of semiotics in the light of certain philosophers, who have paid attention to such notions as subject, Dasein, transcendence, situation, existence and value. Basically what this involves is a scrutiny of " semiosis", the process of production of signs and meaning, from the