60 Tahir Wood
quite meet. In semiotic terms it indicates a fulfillment of the symbolic order, as a mode of
transcendence of the indexical mode of representation, but with a simultaneous recognition of
the impossibility of doing so in any final sense.
In coming to understand this here we may return to one of the earlier points connected
with psychoanalysis and the rather beautiful expression of Rand and Torok cited there, about
―the willingness of psychoanalysis to welcome people into their own personal creations‖
(1993, p. 577). These creations may well have come about below the radar of consciousness,
as semi-animalian creations and defined by a purely indexical order, but via the potential of
the symbolic order, and in dialogue with one another, we may be able to bring these creations
to light. In so doing we might reasonably have hope of bringing to human subjectivity a
renewed self-awareness and a renewed sense of vocation. This is what Rose calls ―the
comedy of absolute spirit, inaugurated mourning,‖ and which she contrasts so well with the
melancholia of ―aberrated mourning‖ (1996, p. 71). This vocation is ultimately political, and
must surely aim at dissolving both the spiritual-animal kingdom and the ̳alien world‘ of the
moral but unhappy consciousness that goes with it, in a new imaginary of personal creation,
desire and recognition of the other.
In pursuit of such insights we have come across a new triad in theory, this time consisting
of psychoanalysis, Rose‘s work on philosophy and representation, and the semiotics of the
symbolic order. This has brought us a long way from Peirce and Saussure and the
atomistically defined, decontextualised sign.
CONCLUSION
Freedom in this view that we are ending with is not reached by the transcending of
boundaries into a spurious infinitude of semiosis; it lies in the capacity for an ever-enhancing
consciousness of the nature of the limit. The pure abstraction contained in quantitative infinity
undoubtedly must contribute to a despairing attitude towards the concept of freedom when it
is illegitimately imported into qualitative domains of cognition. As I have shown, semiosis
may be unlimited, but when it is expanded without limit, that is, into the embrace of excessive
abstraction, it turns into its own opposite, the propagation of meaninglessness.^22 We need to
explore rather the concrete freedom that may be ours from our awareness of the nature of the
limit. Let me try to conclude with a statement about what this could mean, practically and in
terms of semiotic research.
Psychoanalysis has made us aware of the psychic drama that underlies expressive
manifestations of subjectivity. I believe that semiotics provides the principles for
understanding the mechanisms that these psychic processes share with other domains of life,
including naturally the animal kingdom. Although Freud and his followers were not founders
of semiotics, the best exemplars of their work show a profound awareness of principles that
must be defined as semiotic in nature. Psychoanalysts, such as those to whom I have referred,
have pointed towards the liberating potentials of the symbolic order for human agency.
Human agency means inter alia coming to terms with that which is experienced as oppressive
(^22) We may perhaps pass over the question here of whether there are philosophies that actively choose to base
themselves on such dubious ground.