Une rose sans épines : apostille à l’« Apostille au Nom de la rose »

The semiotics of Umberto Eco is prolonged by other means in his novels : much has been written on the subject. But the reverse is also true : Eco’s novels continue in sibylline ways throughout his philosophical work. The great Italian scholar’s prodigious narrative ability manifests itself well before the Name of the Rose, and applies principally to ideas and knowledge. In Eco, the novel dresses with actors, figures, and icons, as well as with a brilliant arrangement of places, times, and aspects, a very solid narrative structure, inheritor to the great popular narratives of the nineteenth century. The paper expounds on the rhetorical effects of this synergy between theorization and narration and focuses, in particular, on the configuration of subjectivity in Eco’s works.