SIGINT signifier

Revisiting the Master-Signifier, or, Mandela and Repression

The concept of the master-signifier has been subject to a variety of applications in Lacanian forms of political discourse theory and ideology critique. While there is much to be commended in literature of this sort, it often neglects salient issues pertaining to the role of master signifiers in the clinical domain of (individual) psychical economy. The popularity of the concept of the master (...

Living Legal Fictions: Constituting the State or Submerging the Signifier

This is an inquiry into the ways the state is constituted as an effective legal fiction. It is based on the premise that the state was not constituted, once and for all, some three centuries ago (as Bourdieu suggests) but that the existence of the state relies on continuing legal and social processes. The focus is on the translation from the legal to the social, specifically the semiotic intera...

Christ’s Body as Public and Private Signifier: a Study of Blason in La Ceppède's Théorèmes

Tokens, Signs, and Symptoms: Signifier Terms in Medical Texts from 1375 to 1725

One of the fundamental tasks of practical medicine has always been to identify the signs of health and disease. In this paper, I contrast the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth OED) entries of four of the most common medical signifier terms (token, sign, symptom, and accident) in English vernacular medical texts from the end of the 14th century to the beginning of the 18th with their occurre...

Sustainability as ideological praxis: The acting out of planning's master- signifier