Francesco Galofaro

Pragmatics, Pain and Forms of Life
Philosophical Investigations on Chronic Pain

Esercizi Filosofici, 6, 2011, pp. 266-280

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Francesco Marsciani

Tracciati di Etnosemiotica

Franco Angeli, Milano 2007

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Through the presentation of a series of analytical studies and research on attitudes, practices and objects of everyday life, the book aims to show some of the possible paths (the "tracks" suggested in the title) in the field of ethnosemiotics. The typology of taps and their relative gestural fields, the avenue of the "walk" in a provincial town, the spaces that organize the relationships of care, the construction of the magic value of the Tarot deck, the transformation of desire in pornography on the Internet: these are all fields of investigation on the construction of the value of our experience, through the articulation of its meaning and its semiotic organization. The result is an indication of a method with its own phenomenological field - semiotic encountering ethnography -, in which the practice of observation (the typical ethnographic survey) is taken in all of its hermeneutic value and simultaneously subjected to the screening and monitoring of semiotic formality, so as to make it possible to describe the emergence of meaning according to a "scientific vocation".

Federico Montanari

Linguaggi della guerra

Meltemi, Roma 2004

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Can we make war the subject of a semiotic analysis? Of course we can, since it embodies all the problems, the variables and the categories that a discipline such as semiotics - in particular sociosemiotics and the semiotics of culture - recognizes as fundamental: time and space, the actors involved and their ability to plan the action, the relationship between passion, perception and action. The"anomaly" in this case is that it's possible to semiotically study not only systems and practices of production, but also of "destruction", such as their codification and representation. In particular the link between war and storytelling opens up this possibility of investigation. It is in this context that the author frames the relationship between strategies and representations, that is, the ways in which the war is "painted" - described, narrated, photographed, filmed. Behind the apparent diversity, the hypothesis of a structural "plot", of one or more models of confrontation and struggle, emerge. In an attempt to provide some definitions of war between anthropology and semiotics, the author insists on the one hand on a semiotic gaze toward the phenomena of the conflict, on the other on the idea - as well underlined by the last Foucault - of a "war" look on history, to underline in cultures the balance of power and the lines of confrontation. More generally, his goal is to consider the war as part of a given cultural universe, looking at an anthropology of conflicts, that can be placed in a broader project of semiotics of cultures.