Cover not available
Article published In:
Dialogue and Ethics
Edited by Ronald C. Arnett and François Cooren
[Language and Dialogue 7:1] 2017
► pp. 80–99

Communicative Ethics

The phenomenological sense of semioethics

| Duquesne University (USA)

This essay examines the importance of semioethics in relationship to the work of Levinas. The interplay of semioethics and Levinas’s commitment to “ethics as first philosophy” announces the communicative height and weight of a semiotic signification that demands responsive human action. Semioethics is a communicative act that wades through the plethora of signs in the global communication production system with the objective of discerning signs of ill health that curtail care of life. Semioethics necessitates attentiveness and responsiveness to Otherness and difference. Semioethics functions as resistance, the unwillingness to accept and abide within an unreflective communication production system composed of taken-for-granted sameness of process and procedure.

Keywords: semioethics, hypertextuality, abduction, semiosis, mother-sense, biosemiotics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A brief survey of semioethics
  • 3.The a priori roots of semioethics
  • 4.Sebeok and existential semiotic resistance
  • 5.Levinas: Otherwise than imposition
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.7.1.06arn
References
Arnett, Ronald C.
2004 “A Dialogic Ethic ‘Between’ Buber and Levinas: A Responsive Ethical ‘I,’” In Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies, ed. by Rob Anderson, Leslie A. Baxter, and Kenneth N. Cissna, 75–90. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 “Awakening Communicative Justice: Attending to the Precariat.” Social Transformations 11: 1–43.Google Scholar
2017 Levinas’s Rhetorical Demand: The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethics. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Bahktin, Mikhail
1984 Rabelais and His World. Bloomingdale, IN: Indiana University Press. First published 1965.Google Scholar
Bernard, Jeff
1991 “Ferruccio Rossi-Landi and a Short History of the Rossi-Landi Network.” Paper presented at the Institute for Socio-Economic Studies, Vienna, Austria. Retrieved from [URL].
Bourdieu, Pierre
2000 Pascalian Meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Caputo, John D.
1993 Against Ethics: Contributions to a Politics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Darwin, Charles
1909 On the Origin of Species. New York, NY: P. F. Collier and Son Company. First published 1859.Google Scholar
Deely, John
2008 “From semiosis to semioethics: The full vista of the action of signs.” Sign Systems Studies 361: 437–490.Google Scholar
2009 Augustine and Poinsot: The Protosemiotic Development. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press.Google Scholar
2013 “Lady Welby and Lady Petrilli.” Semiotica 1961: 13–20.Google Scholar
Eco, Umberto
1976 A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1990 The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Ellul, Jacques
2012 Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers. First published in 1969 by Seabury Press.Google Scholar
Neubauer, Deana
2013 “Lady Welby: Significs and the interpretive mind.” Semiotica 1961: 243–260.Google Scholar
Levinas, Emmanuel
1985 Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.Google Scholar
Peirce, Charles S.
1960 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
2014 Illustrations of the Logic of Science. Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Petrilli, Susan
2004 “Semioethics, subjectivity, and communication: For the humanism of otherness.” Semiotica 1481: 69–91.Google Scholar
2009 “Semiotics as semioethics in the era of global communication.” Semiotica 1731: 343–367.Google Scholar
2011 Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Signific Movement. Berlin: de Gruyter GmbH & Co.Google Scholar
2013a “Semioethics and translation as communication in and across genres.” Semiotica 1951: 97–118.Google Scholar
2013b “Presentation: Two texts at the beginning of a research itinerary. From significs to semioethics.” Semiotica 1961: 513–519.Google Scholar
2014 Sign Studies and Semioethics: Communication, Translation and Values. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015a “Language, communication, and speech: Human signs in global semiosis Supplemented by an interview with Thomas A Sebeok.” Semiotica 2041: 173–237.Google Scholar
2015b Victoria Welby and the Science of Signs. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Petrilli, Susan and Augusto Ponzio
2011 “Transcendence and alterity: On life, communication, and subjectivity.” Semiotica 1841: 229–250.Google Scholar
Ponzio, Augusto
1988 “Rossi-Landi and the Philosophy of Language.” Adriatica.Google Scholar
1990 Man as a Sign. Germany: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 “Theory of meaning and theory of knowledge: Vailati and Welby” Semiotica 1961: 521–532.Google Scholar
Sebeok, Thomas A. and Danesi, Marcel
2000 The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sebeok, Thomas A.
2001 Global Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Sebeok, Thomas A., Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio
2001 Semiotica dell’io. Rome: Meltemi editore srl.Google Scholar
Shaw, Bernard
1949 Back to Methuselah. New York, NY: Penguin Books, Inc.Google Scholar
Song, Wen
2013 “In search of the other: Reading Victoria Welby’s significs.” Semiotica 1961: 443–455.Google Scholar
Standing, Guy
2011 The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. New York, NY: Bloomsburg Academic.Google Scholar
Welby, Victoria
1985 Significs and Language: with an introduction by H. W. Schmitz. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Karolak, Hannah
2020. Communication Ethics Literacy and Counterterrorism. In Examining Ethics and Intercultural Interactions in International Relations [Advances in Public Policy and Administration, ], ► pp. 224 ff. DOI logo
Moser, Keith
2022. Michel Serres’s Biosemiotic Thought: Writing the “Immense Rhapsody” or “Great Story” of Life. In Contemporary French Environmental Thought in the Post-COVID-19 Era [Sustainable Development Goals Series, ], ► pp. 21 ff. DOI logo
Weigand, Edda
2018. The theory myth. Language and Dialogue 8:2 ► pp. 289 ff. DOI logo
Weigand, Edda
2018. Ethics in dialogue. In Dialogic Ethics [Dialogue Studies, 30], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.