Construindo o amigo: para uma semiótica da cooperação intercultural

One of Umberto Eco’s last essays revolves around the rhetorical strategies that “build” the enemy: semiotics can analyze them and show that they are instrumental to power; but semiotics can do even more: it can analyze and promote opposite rhetorical strategies, which “build” friendship. The paper concentrates on one of them, conducive to inter-religious dialogue. In one of his poems devoted to Hafez, Goethe invents a metaphor that opens a space of dialogue between Christian and Islamic aesthetic sensibilities. This metaphor, based on the Christian tradition of acheiropoietai (not-made-with-hands) images of Jesus’ face, allows Goethe to bridge two religious semiotics: the Christian one, rather centered on the visibility of the sacred, and the Islamic one, rather centered on its invisibility.