The Unbridled Meaning of Unsignified Signifiers from Paraliterature to Cinema

There exist texts, often of a ludic or manifestly artistic nature, that seriously query the univocal relationship between signifier and signified, the epistemology of the expression–content type. They are texts written in “impossible” languages, a–semic alphabets indecipherable by statute, which are however able to emanate enormous amounts of meaning for common readers, sometimes catapulting them into a playful childlike dimension, as well as challenging semioticians and linguists, even making them reconsider the theme of idiolect. This amounts to the opening up of a crisis not in any given language, but in the idea of language itself, and perhaps in the idea of the signs that should constitute it. This occurs, for example, in Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, in Kunizo Matsumoto’s Art Brut, and in certain moments in the cinema of Leos Carax. In these cases, marked and obsessive emissions of signifiers do not coincide with precise signifieds, even if, on account of contextual and plastic specificities, they invite decrypting. The act of writing, for these authors, is often first of all the manifestation of an agency, which produces a text leaning heavily towards the phatic side. This happens when the obsession of putting the world into language clashes with parts of the world that refuse to be language–ized. The objective of this essay is to investigate this rich and not very explored context, which challenges some of the inner certainties of semiotics itself.