1st Edition
Semioethics as Existential Dialogue The Gift and Burden of Responsibility
This collection brings together perspectives on the interplay of communication, dialogue and responsibility, exploring communicative acts of disruption towards a social environment attuned to short-sighted individualism. Semioethics highlights the condition of inevitable entanglement with the other at the origin of sociality, which demands a response to the other based on listening and accountability.
The volume introduces readers to the theoretical foundations of semioethics, an emergent direction within sign and language studies which relies upon a commitment to otherness, non-indifference, and dialogue. Building on the dialogic approaches of Mikhail Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas, chapters, grouped into five sections, are all guided by the notion of responsibility towards the other outside do ut des logic and greedy exchange. This collection highlights the ways in which semioethics considers the ethical implications of the signs that mediate dialogue among persons in the social sphere, public and private, sacred and profane. It presupposes the notion that signs are only meaningful in their relation to other signs and the intersubjectivity among persons in dialogue. Chapters also variously examine how the interplay of semioethics and dialogue underpins public life and the existential gifts that sustain a healthy polis.
This book will be of interest to scholars in semiotics, dialogue research, communication ethics, and philosophy of communication.
Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction: The ethical dimension as the I-other intrigue in human semiosis
Augusto Ponzio, Susan Petrilli and Susan Mancino
Part I: Alterity, Infunctionality and Semioethics
1. The right to infunctionality: The foundation of social relations outside the trap of identity
Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio
2. Experience, dialogue and ethics: Peircean reflections on dialogical ethics
Vincent Colapietro
3. Vico, common sense, communication: Recommendations for a semioethics program
Frank Nuessel
Part II: Relation and Communication as Orientation toward the Other
4. Relational logic and semioethics: A Peircean approach
Elize Bisanz
5. The voice as a hero of dialogue: Reading Bakhtin alongside Peirce
Deborah Eicher-Catt
6. Codes of conduct: Signs of moral memory as symbols of ethical eloquence
Richard L. Lanigan
7. Veneration of semioethical imagination: Wavering between the good and evil of De-sign
Farouk Y. Seif
Part III: Gifting, Caring and Semioethics
8. The gift of the unilateral gift: The epigenetic origins of semioethics
Genevieve Vaughan
9. A womanist ethic of care and semioethics: Shared ethical and moral expression
Annette D. Madlock
10. Semioethics as an axiology of care for the self-other: A Welbian geneology
Zoe Hurley
Part IV: Listening in Dialogic Relation
11. Dialogues with and about the past: Semioethics of remembering and forgetting
in a digital age
Susan Mancino
12. Semioethical Dimensions in leisure: Deepening Dialogic Capacities
Annette M. Holba
13. Semioethic Listening: Engagement in ‘the 15-minute City’
Ionut Untea
14. Linguistic Relativity: Semioethics and Climate Change Denialism
Marcel Danesi
Part V: Dialogue, Responsibility and Love
15. Powerful sacred signs: A semioethical approach to the laying on of hands in the sacrament of reconciliation
Fernando López-Arias and Jordi Pujol
16. St. Catherine of Siena: Semioethics-responsive communication
Christina L. McDowell
17. Pope Francis’s Semioethical ‘Net’ Work: An approach for Dialogical Conversion
Christopher J. Oldenburg
Subject and Name Index
Biography
Susan Petrilli is Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Languages at the University of Bari, Aldo Moro, Italy.
Susan Mancino is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Saint Mary’s University, USA.
