Materialistic Semiotics and Social Reality

This book presents writings in semiotics, linguistics, and the philosophy of language—significantly revised, retranslated, and rearranged for this edited volume—by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Adam Schaff, Augusto Ponzio, Massimo A. Bonfantini, Jeff Bernard, and Susan Petrilli. Collectively, the book provides a powerful sign theory useful to investigate how things work, their sense, and meaning. The expanding global world is our social reality, supported and generated in, with and by signs, verbal and nonverbal. Interconnectivity in the sign network is a destiny for life, not only the human but life on the planet overall. This book explains an expression that circulates in everyday language: ‘materialism’. Misunderstandings and disagreements abound regarding its use and meaning, even in special languages—like those of politics or the human sciences concerned with sociohistorical reality under its different aspects. In response, this collection outlines a materialistic approach to problems relevant to signs and society, both contemporary and historical, building towards a scientifically-based materialistic semiotics. It is therefore of great interest to a transversal audience, including those engaged in anthropology, communication studies, cultural studies, ethics, identity studies, ideology, peace studies, political economy, sociology, and translation theory, among numerous other fields.

Susan Petrilli is Full Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Languages, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. She publishes widely in her field promoting cooperation and dialogue among scholars nationally and internationally, as reflected by her intense editorial activities as translator and editor, in English and in Italian. Semiotics of translation and Semioethics are subjects she has introduced into the Italian university system. She also teaches Semiotics and Philosophy of Language. Semioethics, which names a new trend in sign and language studies ideated with Augusto Ponzio in the 1980s, highlights the relation between signs and values with a special interest in the I-other entanglement at the origin of sociality, in dialogical co-implication among bodies, the alterity dimension of semiosis, all of which call for listening, critique, creativity, caring, and responsibility. Her recent books: Senza ripari. Segni, differenze, estraneità (2021); Oltre il significato (2023); Semioetica (with A. Ponzio, 2024); On the Past, Present and Future of Semioethics (with S. Levesque, 2025); and co/edited titles: Maestri di segni e costruttori di pace (2021); The Level-Headed Revolutionary (2021); Exploring the Translatability of Emotions (2022); Intersemiotic Perspectives on Emotions (2023); Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences (2023); Hope as a Sign (2024); Semioethics as Existential Dialogue (2025); Il diritto all’infunzionalità (2025).