44 Tahir Wood
Hegelian notion of ̳limit‘. Let us use Žižek‘s (2008, p. 110) admirably clear exposition of
this:
Boundary is the external limitation of an object, its qualitative confines which confer
upon its identity (an object is ―itself‖ only within these confines, in so far as it fulfils a set of
qualitative conditions); whereas limit results from a ―reflection-into-itself‖ of the boundary: it
emerges when the determinateness which defines the identity of an object is reflected into this
object itself and assumes the shape of its own unattainable limit, of which the object can never
fully become, of what it can only approach into (bad) infinity – in other words, limit is what
the object ought to (although it never actually can) become. In the course of the dialectical
progression, every boundary proves itself a limit: apropos of every identity, we are sooner or
later bound to experience how its condition of possibility (the boundary that delimits its
conditions) is simultaneously its condition of impossibility.Earlier I alluded to the problems that result from classifying icon, index and symbol as
purely externally related categories. A more sophisticated logic is required, one that also goes
beyond current but relatively crude notions of fuzzy boundaries, prototype effects, etc.
Adopting the Hegelian logic above can take us a long way in transcending such limitations
and it will have major consequences for the argument still to follow.
Boundary in our context means that the symbol is simply differentiated from the index
and the icon, but to stop there would raise all the difficulties that I have mentioned. Instead
we must consider the symbolic order as having its own boundary reflected into itself as a
limit; this means that the boundary between the symbolic on the one hand and the iconic-
indexical on the other is experienced as part of the internal structure of the symbolic.^5 To put
it simply, the symbolic is apparently quite distinct from the types of signs that characterise the
animal kingdom, but in actuality it is not so; it always carries the indexical and the iconic
within itself as that from which it must always be trying to distinguish itself, to free itself, but
from which it never entirely can. This has enormous consequences for the understanding of
human semiosis and the stubborn tendency of subjectivity not to advance beyond what,
adopting Hegelian terminology, we might call an ̳animal kingdom of the spirit‘.
In this way natural evolution is recapitulated in the human cultural evolution that emerges
from it, as a co-evolution of subject and semiosis. The generalised capacity for abstraction
that defines this co-evolution has something of the character of infinitude about it and one
might easily adopt Umberto Eco‘s (1976) usage, following Peirce, of ̳unlimited semiosis‘,
but there is something aporetic at the heart of the symbolic order that manifests itself as a
limit, a ̳limit of interpretation‘, to use again one of Eco‘s own memorable titles, which should
cause us to beware of a spurious infinity (with all its potential illusions) that has been
mentioned in the Žižek quotation. We shall return shortly to this aporia, which relates to the
question of hyper-abstraction, and which must sometimes recall us from the giddy heights of
limitlessness.
So let us re-imagine the nature of the icon, not in its animal context now, but already
within the human symbolic order. Recall that one type of icon is the imprint within a plastic
medium, for example a footprint in the sand, which takes on salience as a visual gestalt. What
(^5) Cf. Hegel (Shorter Logic, § 92): ―We cannot therefore regard the limit as only external to being which is then and
there. It rather goes through and through the whole of such existence. The view of limit, as merely an external
characteristic of being-there-and-then, arises from a confusion of quantitative with qualitative limit. Here we
are speaking primarily of the qualitative limit.‖