In the early phase of its development, semiotics was understood as “semeiotics” and studied
symptoms. Today we propose to recover this ancient dimension of semiotics focussed
on health, care and the quality of life, and reorganise it in semioethical terms. In fact,
as interference increases in communication between the historico-social sphere and the
biological, between culture and nature, between the semiosphere and the biosphere, the need
for a “semioethical turn” in the study of signs with an understanding of the relation of signs to
values has become ever more urgent.
Literary writing is particularly interesting from this perspective thanks to its extraordinary
capacity to stage values that animate life to the best in terms of the properly human. These values
are characterized by high degrees of opening to the other, by responsiveness/answerability
toward the other, by a propensity for listening to the other, for giving time to the other.
Construed on relations of distancing and at once of affinity among signs, metaphor—
or more broadly imagery, figurative language—is emblematic of literary writing, though not
limited to it. As amply demonstrated by Victoria Welby, far from serving as a mere decorative
supplement, the figurative dimension of expression is structural to signifying processes, to the
acquisition itself of knowledge and understanding. Welby’s work may be read as prefiguring
recent trends in language studies as represented by cognitive linguistics today.
Mikhail Bakhtin has also made an important contribution in this sense. He has developed
the study of signs in terms of moral philosophy and, in fact, his approach to semiotics is easily
oriented in the sense of semioethics. In such a framework he evidences the close relationship
between sign studies and literary writing. For a full understanding of the sense of Bakhtin’s
approach to studies on verbal language, it is important to highlight his insistence on the inexorable
interconnection—which he describes as direct and dialectical—between literary language and life.
Bakhtin deals with questions of literary writing from the perspective of literature itself.
His excursions outside the field of literature do not imply recourse to an external viewpoint
with claims to offering a description that is totalizing and systemic. On the contrary, Bakhtin
remains inside literature and never leaves it; literature is his observation post, the perspective
from which he conducts his critique, which is anti-systemic and detotalizing. Bakhtin reveals the
internal threads that connect literature to the extra-literary, thematizing the condition of structural
intertextuality in the connection between literary texts and extra-literary texts. In Bakhtin’s view,
the literary text subsists and develops in its specificity as a literary text thanks to its implication
with the external universe. Such implication is also understood in an ethical sense.
Charles Peirce’s semiotics as well has a focus on the relation between cognition, the
interpersonal relation, communication and moral value. He evidences the development of
signifying pathways (the open-ended chain of interpretants) which he describes as potentially
infinite, the role of the imagination and musement in abductive inferential processes, of similarity
(in particular the agapastic) in metaphor, and of metaphor in abduction with its capacity for
invention and innovation. All this makes Peirce’s Collected Papers another precious source for
reflection, together with Bakhtin’s texts, on the relation between semioethics and literary writin
