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Signification Quotes

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Signification Quotes

“I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera. Man is a child wandering lost—to cite Baudelaire`s poem again—in the "forests of symbols." (The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.)”

RealRealityDeathChildhoodConfusionMaturityAdolescenceDeath PenaltySurrealSymbolismCapital PunishmentInfantileSignBaudelaireSignificationMotor Vehicle Accident
Book:The Art of the Novel
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“Barthes referred to semiology, the science of signs, in pursuing this task. He followed Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that a sign is merely the outcome of an arbitrary relationship between a signifier (a word, picture, utterance) and a signified (a concept or mental image to which the signifier gives rise) – implying that the words we use have no fixed meanings in themselves. De Saussure called this ability of the sign to represent or convey meaning signification.”

BarthesSignificationSemiologiaSaussure
Book:Baudrillard for Architects
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“What must always be remembered is that myth is a double system; there occurs in it a sort of ubiquity: its point of departure is constituted by the arrival of a meaning. […] the signification of the myth is constituted by a sort of constantly moving turnstile which presents alternately the meaning of the signifier and its form, a language-object and a metalanguage, a purely signifying and a purely imagining consciousness. This alternation is, so to speak, gathered up in the concept, which uses it like an ambiguous signifier, at once intellective and imaginary, arbitrary and natural.”

MythMeaningSignification
Book:Mythologies
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“The signifier of myth presents itself in an ambiguous way: it is at the same time meaning and form, full on one side and empty on the other. […] The meaning will be for the form like an instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed richness, which it is possible to call and dismiss in a sort of rapid alternation: the form must constantly be able to be rooted again in the meaning and to get there what nature it needs for its nutriment; above all, it must be able to hide there. It is this constant game of hide-and-seek between the meaning and the form which defines myth.”

FormMythMeaningSignificationSignifiers
Book:Mythologies
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