Semiotik der Gewalt: Zur zeichentheoretischen Organisationsform von Dekonstruktion in der Literatur der Moderne (German text, Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Juenger, Germany).

摘要

The present study seeks to demonstrate how violence inhabits semiosis and executes its circular logic within signification, Pursuant to the argument that the production of meaning can only operate where there is interpretability, signification precipitates from the internal differentiation of the sign. Yet at the same time, signification attempts to annihilate difference in a proprietary act as it lays claim to the signified and announces the presence of unequivocal meaning. Since socially manifest violence can be described as the institutionalization of differences inhibiting equality, the abolition of violence evokes a program that intends to defeat violence through the elimination of differentiality. The successful obliteration of all disparities, however, devises a social cosmos in which undifferentiated sameness belies the vision of justice: absolute non-violence coincides with absolute violence as it becomes indistinguishable from totalitarian uniformity. Violence thus emerges as a principle that lives in the structure of difference and is disguised where non-differentiality is proclaimed. Performing this circular logic, semiotic procedures, as they aim at the absence of difference in the name of semiotic clarification, are contaminated with violence and reveal themselves inexorably as aggressive operations.; After a theoretical framework that focuses on the works of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, René Girard, Michel Serres, and Emmanuel Lévinas, the dissertation engages in exemplary interpretations of three representatives of German modernist thought: Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Jünger. Defining the modern subject as one that is beset by disparity, they develop projects that attempt to salvage authenticity outside of differentiation. Following the course of aggressive signification, however, these projects inevitably arrive at a position that is itself permeated by violence. In Musil's case, the utopian locus is inhabited by a psychotic mass murderer, while Benjamin calls for the restitution of paradisiacal non-differentiality through the elimination of historical time, thereby vindicating destructive procedures that accelerate the arrival of the apocalyptic end. Finally, Junger conceives of the machine as a medium of significatory precision, and envisions a comprehensively technological world that molds individuals into uniform entities, thus employing a strategy that violently performs non-differentiality on the human body,