Signs, Language, and Life: Pathways and Perspectives in Augusto Ponzio’s Scientific Research

Abstract

Augusto Ponzio has been writing since the mid-1960s producing a quantity of publications not easily equaled, as a glance at his complete bibliography will reveal. He investigates themes and methodologies within the spheres of philosophy of language, general linguistics, and semiotics with a special focus on problems of language and communication, translation and ideology, literary theory and critique, signs and meaning, value, and behavior. Understood in a semiotical and transdisciplinary framework, historical, literary, philosophical, sociological, and economic-political critique are united in their common interest for signs. Semiotic critique is also critique of all forms of ideological separatism and of pseudoscientific specialism, including the separation between human sciences and natural sciences. As he explains in a brief bio-bibliographical note, Ponzio developed his theoretical interests with special reference to such authors as Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Levinas, Marx, Adam Schaff, and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi: “from these authors I have developed what they share in spite of their differences, that is, the idea that the life of the human individual in his/her concrete singularity, whatever the object of study, and however specialized the analysis, cannot prescind from involvement without alibis in the destiny of others.” Ponzio searches for the sense for man of scientific research in general and of the general science of signs in particular. His quest is oriented by the Husserlian distinction between “exact science” and “rigorous science.” And developing this particular trend, focused on the search for sense, Ponzio, in collaboration with S. Petrilli, elaborates his original conception of “ethosemiotics,” “telo-” or “teleosemiotics,” subsequently developed into “semioethics.”