Abstract
This paper focus on the problem posed by the rigidity of categories to the translation/transaction operation of the intercultural approach to law. This rigidity holds subjects back from leaving the more structured paradigms (moral, social, cultural, legal) of their culture. The first methodological issue this paper seeks to clarify is to place the problem of categories within a narrowly delimited research horizon in which this issue can be treated with an appropriate degree of scientific rigor. This need seems to find a solution in a shift from the strictly legal plane to the linguistic plane. In linguistic terms, one could observe categories as the articulation of certain linguistic signs (signifier/signified) to a high degree of abstraction and fixity of meaning. The question, then, is whether and how it is possible to overcome the resistance of this elementary unit of language. This opens to the legal-theoretical problem a strictly linguistic (semiological and semiotic) line of inquiry. The research idea of this contribution is that the linguistic sign has spaces of resilience that remain unknown to the semiological view but visible to a semiotic view. A ‘bridge’ between the abstraction of the semiotic level and the concreteness of the legal level can be find in the most recent developments of cultural anthropology, which will be used here. Following this approach and these tools the aim of this paper is to show the potential of the sign observed from a semiotic perspective in drawing intersubjective and even interspecific semiotic lines useful to intercultural law. The method adopted here consists of an epistemological pluralism that holds together semiotics, anthropology and law, thus showing the fruitfulness of an openly interdisciplinary approach.
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Notes
I refer here in particular to Mario Ricca’s studies and his latest book [44].
According to Aristotle, categories are supreme groups or genera that collect all the properties that can be predicated of being [3].
I refer to the Kantian twelve categories [26].
An aspect that was already clear to Kant [26]. On this topic, for the scientific relevance of the point of observation, see Schrödinger’s remarks [49: 344–347]. According to Schrödinger, the ‘brilliance’ of Kant’s position ‘lies in the idea that this unique object—spirit or world—may well be susceptible to other aspects that we cannot grasp and that do not involve the forms of space and time’, so that ‘there are probably other ways of manifestation beyond those represented by space and time’ ([49: 346]), and, one might add returning to the point discussed here, by the conceptual categories by which we normally refer to space and time.
Ricca [44: 211].
Saussure writes explicitly: ‘language is a social institution’ [48: 25]. The close relationship between society and language was also underlined by Benveniste, who wrote: ‘language, in fact, is for man the only means to reach another man, to transmit a message to him and to receive one in return. Thus, language places and presupposes the other. With language you immediately give society, which, in turn, brings together only through the use of shared signs of communication. With society language is immediately given. The two entities thus imply each other’ [6: 99].
The signs were also defined by Saussure as the ‘concrete entities of the language’ [48: 125].
See Saussure [48: 83].
Saussure [48: 83–84].
Saussure [43: 84].
Saussure [48: 84].
Saussure [48: 85].
Saussure [48: 84].
Saussure [48: 85].
Saussure [48: 136]. Saussure also explains that ‘The characteristic role of language in the face of thought is not to create a physical material means for the expression of ideas, but to serve as an intermediary between thought and sound, in conditions such that their union necessarily leads to mutual delimitations of unity. Thought, chaotic by its nature, is forced to become specific by decomposing. There is therefore neither materialization of thoughts, nor spiritualization of sounds, but it is the fact, in some mysterious measure, that ‘sound thought’ implies divisions and that language elaborates its unity by forming between two amorphous masses’ [48: 137]. In different words, Benveniste expressed the same fact: ‘the spoken language undoubtedly serves to carry 'what we want to say'’, and this is certainly a ‘thought content’. But "This takes form only and only when it is uttered. It receives form from language and language, which is the matrix of every possible expression cannot be separated from it and cannot transcend it’ [6: 76]. Now, ‘this great structure [language], which contains in itself minor structures and of different levels, gives shape to the content of thought’. Therefore, concludes Benveniste, ‘the linguistic form […] is the condition of transmissibility of thought, but also and above all its condition of realization. We grasp thought only when it is already conforming to the patterns of language. Apart from this, there is only dark volition, impulse that resolves in gestures, mimicry. To a rigorous analysis of the data that we face, wondering if thought can do without language or circumvent it as an obstacle appears a meaningless question’ [6: 77].
It is difficult to render in English—returning the semantic and phonetic proximity between the two different forms used in the continental context—the difference between ‘language’ as a conventional system of signs based on a given phonological system, and ‘language’, understood as a more general ability of expression that every living being—as we will see later—is able to have. Here, to refer specifically to the first meaning hereafter, the French term used by Saussure ‘langue’ will be used.
Saussure [48: 137].
The game of chess is a classic example of Saussure [48: 107–108].
Saussure [48: 139].
I assume here the concept of world as a totality of meaning for man, very close to the Heideggerian idea. According to Heidegger, indeed, world is the ‘existential determination of being-there’ [22: 99], the ‘experience of the context and in the context of life’ operated by being-there [17: 80], or the ‘horizon of human transcendence […] field of possibility toward which man is stretched’, [19, p. 109] whose ‘opening’ is possible only to language [2, p. 224].
See Kant [26].
The reference here is obviously to Einstein’s general relativity [16].
For example, Benveniste considered a ‘misunderstanding’ the idea that ‘the temporal system of a language reproduces the nature of 'objective' time’, a misunderstanding due to the fact that it is ‘so strong the [wrong] propensity to see in language the mold of reality’. While rather, concludes Benveniste, ‘languages offer […] different constructions of the real’ [6: 38].
Commenting on Heraclitus, physicist Erwin Schrödinger states: ‘the criterion of reality is only the fact of ‘being common’. Based on this we build the real world’. Now, this ‘common being’ is precisely what—we have seen it clearly explained by Saussure and Benveniste-is made possible and guaranteed by language. [49: 147].
Sacco [46: 193].
Wittgenstein [54: 59].
Ricca [44: 211].
Heidegger [23: 31]. This is the solution identified by Heidegger to get out of the conceptual fences of metaphysics [21: 71–86], which, after all, is the crystallization of (Western) language observed in the philosophical context, the historical-speculative horizon at the end of which, as Galimberti says, ‘language says only the word of the thought it calculates, and the thing, arranged in the enclosure of this language, no longer says about itself, but simply says its correspondence to the calculation of thought’ [19: 215]. So ‘the limitation […] is produced by that representational thinking which reduces and concludes the meaning of the things that appear in the circumscribed sphere of mathematical anticipations, which in themselves resolve all possible meaning and significance. the closed thinking of anticipatory representation arises when man no longer grasps himself in the world, but places the world before him and, objectifying it, disposes of it with a view to its use, its manipulation, its domination’ [19: 215]. So, the problem posed by the linguistic sign widens becoming the problem of representation and involves in depth the philosophical dimension. The question of representation is what will be analyzed below.
See Schrödinger [49: 157–158].
Whorf, who had a scientific background, explicitly related his studies of anthropology and linguistics to the developments of physics of his time. More specifically, Whorf realized that one of the greatest difficulties of physics of those years consisted in the availability of concepts to express the paradoxical relations of particles investigated by quantum mechanics. A solution could come, according to him, from languages other than those of the Indo-European family, accustomed to a rigid ‘spatialization’ of thought, that is to accord thought to the external three-dimensional spatial reality, but rather from exotic languages accustomed to conceiving time and space in a completely different way. This idea was based on Whorf’s deep study of the Hopi North American populations. See Whorf [53].
In English, the difference between semiological and semiotic is difficult to return even conceptually, being the first approach linked to a tradition of research only continental, as will be shown later.
See the entry ‘semiotics’ explained by Umberto Eco and Giovanna Cosenza in Nicola Abbagnano’s Dizionario di filosofia [1: 980–981].
Saussure writes: ‘one can therefore conceive a science that studies the life of signs within the framework of social life; it could form a part of social psychology and, consequently, of general psychology; we will call it semiology. […] Linguistics is only a part of this general science’ [48: 26]. The ability to generalize this discipline is clearly understood by Saussure who states: ‘by this way not only will the linguistic problem [the nature of the linguistic sign] be clarified, but we think that considering the rites, customs etc. as signs, such facts will appear in another light, and one will then feel the need to group them in semiology and to explain them with the laws of this science’ [48: 27].
Peirce [37: 228].
Kohn [28: 29].
Kohn [28].
The book also attracted the attention of Philippe Descola, who wrote the preface to the French edition [29: 11–17].
Kohn [28: 133].
See Kohn [28: 135].
Kohn [28: 236].
Kohn [28: 135].
Kohn [28: 136].
Chatenet and Di Caterino [7: 11].
Chatenet and Di Caterino [7: 11].
Kohn [28: 83].
‘Not only the representation is wider than we think, but also completely different’ [29: 123].
Kohn [28: 84].
A space not only metaphorical but also physical: the forest in which humans, animals and plants coexist and interact is the privileged field of these anthropological research.
Kohn [28: 30].
Kohn [28: 30].
Kohn [28: 31].
See Kohn [28: 50].
Kohn [28: 31].
Kohn [28: 32].
Kohn [28: 33].
Sacco [46: 190].
See Kohn [28: 55].
See Ricca [44: 227].
The adjective ‘chorological’ is intended here to illuminate a horizon of research that can receive fruitful contributions from anthropology, law, philosophy, and in which physical space and semiotic dynamics are interconnected [44: 211]. As Mario Ricca specifies, ‘the term chorology [is] a word deeply engraved by historical lines and used, with respect to geography, for the analysis of places when considered for their dynamic, organic, ethological and cultural semantic projections’ [44: 226].
See Ricca [44: 228].
See Wittgenstein [54: 10–18].
Kohn [28: 31–32].
Kohn [28: 32].
See Aristotle [4: 1254, 9–10].
See Wittgenstein [54: 17].
See Saussure [48: 29].
Observing the question upside down one could observe, as Sergio Cotta does, that ‘going to the law is not going to a generic ‘thing’, but to a human ‘form of life’, that is, to man himself’ [11: 17].
Kohn [28: 92].
‘Living beings are loci of selfhood’: this is the ‘general claim’ derived ‘empirically’ by Kohn [28: 94].
Kohn [28: 34].
Kohn [28: 56].
See Kohn [28: 58].
See Kohn [28: 58].
See Kohn [28: 59].
Kohn [28: 59].
Ricca [44: 13].
See Kohn [28: 59].
Ricca also adds that ‘it is not, however, a kind of thirdness that includes the original spatial/semantic circuits and their differences by annihilating them. It is instead a horizontal one, in the sense that it makes it possible to identify the signical interfaces that are suitable to support the coexistence and the intermingling condensation of these spaces of meaning by preserving their recognizability. The process through which such thirdness will take shape will inevitably produce some changes and make itself a hub for further semiotic relationships. This step, however, will fuel, in turn, new differentiations that trigger the request for new translations along a semiotic direction, virtually without end’. Ricca [44: 235].
See Kohn [28: 55].
See Cotta [11: 142–152].
See Hénaff [24: 254].
Hénaff [24: 254].
See Hénaff [24: 256].
Hénaff [24: 257].
Hénaff [24: 257].
See Villey [51].
See Hénaff [24: 257–258].
See Cotta [11: 67–68, 138].
See Kohn [28: 16].
Kohn [28: 94].
Kohn [28: 92].
See Kohn [28: 71–81].
See Jonas [25].
Ricca [44: 340].
Ricca [44: 298].
See Corrias [10: 894–895].
See Corrias [10: 896–897].
Since ‘it could be said that constitutional enunciations are the bricks; and the edifice of subjectivity requires their utilization within the processes of democratic integration’, Ricca [42: 38].
See Pope Francis [18].
Ricca [43: 129].
See Colli [9].
He meant the Greek verb ‘φαίνεσθαι’. See Heidegger [22: 56].
Heidegger [22: 57].
See Ricca [44: 165].
See De Santillana [14].
See Ricca [44: 189–199].
About this concept see Rouland [45: 332–338].
See Ricca [42: 250–252].
Neuwirth [36: 44].
See Neuwirth [35; 36].
See Neuwirth [36: 40, 50].
See Neuwirth [36: 45–46].
See Schrödinger [49: 20–36].
See Neuwirth [36].
Neuwirth [36: 46].
Neuwirth [36: 50].
Neuwirth [36: 52].
A contribution both critical (‘krínein’: separate to better understand and judge), to observe what we already have and denounce what we lack, both speculative, to discover what the Others have realized and/or developed of useful to our current purposes.
Neuwirth [34: 48].
Neuwirth [36: 51].
I refer for example to Malinowski [34].
See Ricca [44: 277].
See Ricca [44: 291–304].
About this concept see Glenn [20: 23–71].
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Cucco, I. Below and Beyond the Signifier: Space as a Living Semiotic Horizon, a Key to Interculturality and a Challenge for Law. Int J Semiot Law (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-024-10106-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-024-10106-6