The labyrinth entrances: essay on racinian semiotics

Abstract

Racinian theater center-stages (at its epistemological and hermeneutical core) less the discourse of the tragic than the tragic spectacle of discourse. Language broken, ruptured, often slaking into silence reveals itself to be no longer a sign (that is, invested, representational): it no long represents, but subsists rather, much like an object, a form of matter, a quasi-living being within its own arena of self-sustaining reality. Semantically dispossessed, semiotically invested, functionally impotent, the word embraces and metatextualizes the same preterition that it bespeaks. Any seeming departure from this model, however tenacious it may appear, yet collaborates in the factitiousnss of the textual construct and leads, as it must, deliberately, unflaggingly and encodedly to failure.