Between Semeiotics and Semiotics: The Body as a Signifying Text

From the Greek σημεῖον sēmeion, “sign, mark”, the term semiotics shares its etymology with the word semeiotics, which refers to the branch of medicine dealing with the interpretation of symptoms. In fact, according to various scholars (see, for instance, Baer 1988; Sebeok 2001), semeiotics may be considered a semiotic approach through and through — and possibly the first one ever. Although describing symptoms as brute facts emerging from the body — i.e. purely phenomenal sensations that are not necessarily linked to any act of interpretation —, in fact, Roland Barthes (1972) supported that they turn into signs once they are “put into discourse”, that is, when they are “modelled” (in Lotman’s (1977) terms) through language. Thomas Sebeok (1976) then pushed further the association between signs and symptoms, conceiving the latter as “compulsive, automatic, non-arbitrary sign[s], such that the signifier coupled with the signified in the manner of a natural link” (46). In this view, the symptoms are then conceived as a marked category (species) of an unmarked one (genus, i.e. the sign), thus acquiring a semiotic status per se. Whichever perspective one takes, it is undeniable that corporeality plays a crucial role in the processes of signification underlying semeiotics: the body is not only the place where symptoms become visible, but also the entity experiencing them (on the perceptual level) and making them intelligible (on the cognitive level). What is more, the body is part of the world and interacts with such a world, thus necessarily being a “social body”. This implies that symptoms, making themselves visible on and through the body, cannot but be put into a discourse, since that body cannot but communicate with other bodies. Our presentation will retrace the theoretical reflection on these issues, also relating to more recent research on sensoriality, aesthesis, and corporeality (see in particular Pozzato and Violi 2002; Fontanille 2004; Finol 2015; 2016).