Semiotics

Beyond Signification: The Co-Evolution of Subject and Semiosis 59

for introjection and the work of mourning that we saw being offered in psychoanalysis. As
such it may be said to involve a misrecognition of the limit in the symbolic order. In place of
true reflection there arises instead an abstract morality in implacable opposition to an alien
world, an opposition within the self that is now understood as ̳the way of the world‘, and
which can only be finally dissolved in a ̳world beyond the world‘, in death or in heaven.^21

3.4. Freedom as the Realisation of the Symbolic Realm

The further evolution of the subject, beyond such an impasse, must entail an awareness of
the implications and limitations of the index-dominated semiosis that has created an animal
kingdom of the spirit. Further than that it also implies the possibility of a less interested form
of cognition.
Certain terms suggest themselves at this point as ways of characterising such unrealised
possibility. The one is speculative thought, because this has been the term that has been used
for the formulation of propositions that are to be investigated and tested, of possibilities that
may realised in the future. However, because the term speculative is also used within
everyday discourse for precisely the sorts of meaning that we are trying to go beyond – think
here of the use of this word in the world of finance for example – one might prefer to
substitute for it the term ideal.
̳Ideal‘ here will stand for those sorts of propositions that realise the symbolic beyond the
limitations of the indexical, in other words beyond the human capacities that have been
historically predominant. But precisely because those animalian roots of the symbolic can
never be entirely left behind, as already explained, we should perhaps speak of an ̳impossible
ideal‘ as the ultimate limit of the symbolic realm. This impossible ideal is the Hegelian limit
that was discussed in the quotation from Žižek provided earlier. It is a limit that cannot be
reached, and in the full awareness of this lies the wisdom of comedy, surely the decisive step
beyond the animal kingdom of the spirit. In this connection Gillian Rose (1996, pp. 72-73)
distinguishes between two notions of the comic:

... the law is no longer that of Greek ethical life; it is no longer tragic. Antigone stakes her

life as the individual pathos of substantial life in collision with itself: She presents part of its

truth and she acknowledges the part of that truth which exceeds her. By contrast modern law

is that of legal status, where those with subjective rights and subjective ends deceive

themselves and others that they act for the universal when they care only for their own

interests. This is the spiritual-animal kingdom: It is comic, not in the sense of frank joviality

or careless gaiety and self-mockery, but in the sense of bitter and repugnant intrigue by

individuals who deceive others by seeming to share their interests and whose real interest is

without substance. These modern comic characters are unmasked by others and not by their

own self-dissolving inwardness of humor.

It is rather this ―self-dissolving inwardness of humour‖ that Rose discovers in the
Hegelian philosophy and in its very logic, a ―comedy of misrecognition‖ (Rose, 1996, p. 75).
It is humanity striving for a full realisation of the symbolic order in the consciousness that it
must always fall short, that theory and practice will strain towards one another and yet never

(^21) Or perhaps, like the character of Liza in Turgenev‘s Home of the Gentry, in the entry to a nunnery.