title: Basics of Semiotics (Advances in Semiotic)
author: John Deely
description: The last half century has produced an increasing interest in semiotics, the study of signs. As an interdisciplinary field, moreover, semiotics has produced a vast literature from many different points of view. As the discourse has expanded, clear definitions and goals become more elusive. Semioticians still lack a unified theory of the purposes of semiotics as a discipline as well as a comprehensive rationale for the4 linking of semiosis at the levels of culture, society, and nature. As Deely suggests in his preface, the image of the modern semiotic universe is the same as that of astronomy in 1611 as suggested by John Donne: "Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; / All just supply, and all Relation."
zlib_text: JACQUES DERRIDA 
  SPEECH 
  AND 
  WRITING 
  ACCORDING 
  TO HEGEL 
  t,'anslated by 
  ALFONSO LINGIS 
  The Pennsylvania State University 
  INTRODUCTION 
  TO HEGEL'S SEMIOLOGY 
  "Since real difference belongs to the extremes, this mean (A4itte) is but an 
  abstract neutrality, their real possibility, the as it were theoretical element of 
  the existence, process, and results of chemical objects. In the corporeal ele- 
  ment water has this function of being medium; in the spiritual element, 
  insofar as there is an analogon of such a relationship in it, we must seek this 
  function on the side of signs in general, and more precisely (naher) in 
  language." 
  Science of Logic 
  What must be understood here by mean ? By semiological medium ? And 
  more precisely--(naher) more closely, more narrowly--by linguistic me- 
  dium ? We shall here be interested in the difference of this narrowing, dis- 
  covering on the way nothing else than a narrowing of difference : another 
  name for the medium of the spirit. 
  In the E