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Linguistic wisdom from Eco:
"It is true that signs in themselves, e.g., the words of verbal language in their dictionary form, look like petrified conventions by comparison to the vitality and energy displayed by texts in their production of new sense, where they make signs interact with each other in the light of their previous intertextual history. Texts are the loci where sense is produced. When signs are isolated and removed from the living texture of a text, they do become spectral and lifeless conventions. A text casts into doubt all the previous signification systems and renews them; frequently it destroys them. It is not necessary to think here of texts such as Finnegans Wake, true textual machines celibataires conceived to destroy grammars and dictionaries. It suffices to recall that it is at the textual level that rhetorical figures operate by 'killing' senses. Language, at its zero-degree, believes that a lion is an animal and that a king is a human being; the metaphor 'the king of the forest' adds to 'lion' a human property and forces 'king' to accept an animal quality. But this 'semantic fission,' to use Levi-Strauss' beautiful coinage, is made possible exactly because both 'king' and 'lion' pre-exist in the lexicon as functives of two pre-coded sign functions. If signs were not endowed with a certain text-oriented meaning, metaphors would not work, and every metaphor would only say that a thing is a thing."
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, November 03, 2007 at 11:18 AM
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