Thresholds and Tortoises: Modernist Animality in Pirandello's Fiction

The present study provides a posthumanist reading of Pirandello’s fiction, with the aim of highlighting the author’s specifically modernist take on animality. The first half of the chapter illustrates Pirandello’s awareness of a zoological continuum encompassing human and nonhuman beings; particular emphasis is placed on his innovative dialogue with the nineteenth-century tradition (Balzac), as well as on the typically modernist aspects of his posthumanist gaze – e.g. the sense of a “cosmic” detachment from human events, and the strategic use of thresholds (openings and epilogues) to undermine the anthropocentrism inherent to traditional narrative forms. The second half focuses on a specific case study, i.e. the role assigned to the tortoise in the short stories “Paura d’esser felice” and “La tartaruga”. In both texts, the protagonist’s “becoming-tortoise” (Deleuze and Guattari) is instrumental to Pirandello’s modernist critique of anthropocentrism

Structure/Structuralism

The first issue of Word, the Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, published in April 1945 by Roman Jakobson and André Martinet, both exiles living in the USA, features one of the first articles by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958) (L’analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie) and the last essay by Ernst Cassirer (2002) (Structuralism in Modern Linguistics), who died a few weeks before its publi cation. This is the official birth of structuralism, a term seemingly coined by the author of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen in his posthumous essay with its testimonial quality

Intensive Innovation: A Semiotic View

Part 1: Organisational Semiotics: Theory and ApplicationInternational audienceWe have entered a new innovation regime: that of acceleration and intensification. These situations of intensive innovation and disruption question the identity of the objects. The question of the identity of objects directly refers to epistemological questions. In particular, how objects happen in the world - do they exist before their descriptions? But the question of identity also refers to semiotic questions. In this paper, we will present a semiotic framework in order to analyse the question of how business or IT or Space systems emerge in an interdisciplinary environment. Namely we will present a multi-viewpoints semiotics. In parallel to this approach we will introduce an innovative design theory initiated by Armand Hatchuel and Benoît Weil: The C-K theory. We will then try to better understand what brings the two approaches closer together and what separates them

Immanence/Imminence. Thinking about Immanence and Individuation

The aim of this chapter is to compare the concept of Immancence, or rather, the definition of "plane of Immanence" ad described by Deleuze (and Deleuze ahd Guattari) with the concept or Individuation (in Simondon, but also within a long phiosophical tradition from medieval philosopfhy to Leibniz). The chapter will also consider the possible consequences of this investigation on socio-semiotic research regarding a) the building of meaning processes; and b) possible connections with other areas of social and human sciences (such as the Theory of Systems)