Sémiotique des cultures catastrophiques

Each culture develops a specific semiotic ideology of catastrophe and reparation. Comparing and contrasting them reveals continuities and discontinuities. Traditional Japanese aesthetics resolves the anxiety of potential catastrophe by focusing on the fullness of immanence. In the West, on the other hand, for whom the idea of the future is essential, the fatalistic approach of Greco-Roman civilization is replaced by the Christian idea of the miracle. A study of the iconography of broken glass and its holy repair is one way of understanding the aesthetic and semiotic consequences of this transition.