Form and Force of the Sacred: A Semiotic Study of the Temptations of Saint Anthony

“The sacred” has been at the core of reflection in most disciplines dealing with religion (Leone 2014). Semiotics must know this literature but cannot merely rely on pre-existing definitions. Its aim consists, instead, in reconceptualizing the sa- cred in terms of language. The article that follows understands the sacred as a force that, in language, is paradoxical; on the one hand, it is the origin of every religious expression: words, images and other signs are shaped in order to signify the telluric energy that underlies the human access to language; on the other hand, however, as this force is expressed by the forms of language and communicated by them, it is also somehow betrayed, compressed, frustrat- ed. The sacred, in religious discourse, remains always as shadow of what it could not be possibly said, as echo of the unfathomable, as an aura of unexpressed potentiality. Sacrifice, therefore, that is, literally, “the making of the sacred,” is also simultaneously an act of renouncing, a production of residues, a movement of nostalgia.