Paths-On the Formation of the Subject in a Theory of Semiotics

That semiotics has close relations with semantics, the latter having a logical-phil- osophical or rather linguistic origin, is a fact that is not only theoretically but also historically established. On one side, generative semiotics moves from struc- tural semantics, so that the entire work by Greimas could be read as an expansion of his first work, his Sémantique structurale (Greimas 1966) properly indicating the opening of his research program (Fabbri 2000). On the other side, as a con- sequence of his philosophical milieu, Eco is not encumbered by the burden of lin- guistics: yet it is always in the light of the linguistic-structural semantic paradigm that he attempted in his crucial book, A Theory of Semiotics, that generalization of semiotics announced in the Italian translation (Trattato di semiotica generale, literally, Treatise on general semiotics). The thesis that I will try to develop in my contribution is that Eco’s reflection on semantics in his Treatise (that I consider his magna opus) implies a specific theory of semiotic subjectivity that will remain operative in his later works. Violi (2007) has already investigated some issues related to subjectivity in Eco’s Encyclopaedia. Here I will try to describe analyti- cally how this specific subjectivity emerges in A Theory of Semiotics.