Chapter published in:
Iconicity in Cognition and across Semiotic Systems
Edited by Sara Lenninger, Olga Fischer, Christina Ljungberg and Elżbieta Tabakowska
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 18] 2022
► pp. 47–62

Iconicity as a key epistemic source of change in the self

The film The Lives of Others revisited in the light of triadic semiotics

| Universidad de la República , Uruguay

In this text, the phenomenological categorial analysis at the basis of Peircean semiotic is used to explore the working of iconic signs and their relationship to the self as an ongoing interpretative process as well as to the manifold of identities that human beings adopt in the different circumstances they go through. A film was chosen to describe the relevance of iconicity for the evolving self-interpretative process that serves to adapt us to life changes. The plot of The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen, von Donnersmarck 2006) brings out in exemplary fashion the epistemic function of iconicity to account for spontaneity as the origin of the new and unexpected in the lifeworld. Peirce’s triadic analysis of the imagination elucidates how change is introduced even in a most authoritarian sociopolitical system, whose main goal is to avoid the irruption of the freewheeling possibilism of iconicity.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: From a deadening Law to life-enhancing spontaneity
  • 2.Iconicity and the emergence of “variety and diversity” in the universe
  • 3.The transgression of iconicity against the Law and its submissive indexical signs
  • 4.The working of indexicality in the realm of the Law: In the semiotic penal colony
  • 5.The intervention of art in the conversion process of a State official
  • 6.Conclusion: Once upon an iconic instant…
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.18.03and
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