Repenser la nature en sémiotique

Abstract

Nature is nowadays an absolute value: in politics, in tourism, in religion, in urban thinking, in design, in consumerism, in food, in the media. Just add the adjective 'natural' to anything from a city to a snack, from a fur to a washing machine, and condescensions and smiles, convictions and credit cards immediately spring up. We have a kind of brand, or meta-brand. This absolute value has even invaded, for obviously different purposes, the field of the human sciences, today more than ever the artisans of an empiricism that has lost all salutary problematicity. The human sciences are in fact increasingly in search of the so-called biological bases of so-called human nature, particularly semiotics, which tends to slavishly follow the most diffuse epistemological trends, without discussing them in depth on the basis of its own internal relevance: to what extent is the paradigm of meaning opposed to that of brute facts? is meaning not the opposite of the given? does the primacy of the relation not exclude in principle any mastery of objectivity?