2022 - The Nose of Pinocchio: A Semiotics of Facial Myths (original) (raw)
Related papers
The transcendence of the face: A semiotic-linguistic path
Sign Systems Studies
This paper starts with an examination of the terms used to designate the face in different languages, in particular in Italian, comparing these with the definitions provided by some authoritative dictionaries as well as with their etymology. This exploration yields some remarkable results: firstly, it appears that the face is indeed a term that has a material meaning, but at the same time it is a social object; secondly, the importance of the communicative function emerges, which makes the face similar to the mask and in some ways to the arbitrariness of language. All this suggests that the philosophical status of the face is that of ‘transcendence’ which is a condition of that state of freedom that we attribute to ourselves and that can be defined as ‘human exception’.
Humanism, Becoming and the Demiurge in The Adventures of Pinocchio
Cunoașterea Științifică, 2023
The common thread of Pinocchio’s story is his desire to become a human being. Unlike some creators who approached the adventures of Pinocchio in the context of posthumanism the transhumanism embraces technological progress while strongly defending human rights and individual choice. Pinocchio is aware of his incompleteness: he seeks during the story to become „a real boy.” Human consciousness can refer to things that we do not perceive directly. Pinocchio is a „child” without a mother, created by his father to fill his loneliness. He highlights the current problem of the relationship between man and his creation, out of control. CUNOAȘTEREA ȘTIINȚIFICĂ, Volumul 2, Numărul 3, Septembrie 2023, pp. 154-158 ISSN 2821 – 8086, ISSN – L 2821 – 8086 , DOI: 10.58679/CS44127
2021 - On Muzzles and Faces: The Semiotic Limits of Visage and Personhood
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 2021
The essay investigates the anthropological concept of personhood from the point of view of the dialectics between two fundamental elements of the socio-cultural, linguistic, and semiotic construction of the self-identity of the human species: on the one hand, the human face and, on the other, the non-human muzzle. After demonstrating that their semantics is contrastively articulated in all Indo-European languages, and after showing that such contrast is featured also in several non-Indo-European languages, including those referring to supposedly alternative “ontologies of nature”, the essay criticizes such opposition through a close reading of Lévinas, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida’s philosophical texts on the face and on animality. Ultimately, it proposes that the construction of the animal muzzle as an interface of non-personhood is instrumental to the substitution of the human victim in the sacrifice that establishes the human community. Only through eradicating the primordial stigmatization of the muzzle, however, will a non-violent foundation of human personhood and community be possible.
This thematic issue of the German art history journal "kritische berichte" gathers analytical approaches to the ‘phenomenon face’ from different disciplines: neurophysiology, philosophy of the body, cultural history, surgery, medieval history, and the history of art. In their contributions, the authors examine the face as medium and material, as mise-en-scene and matter, as mirror and membrane, producer and recipient – as a cultural construction and a human determinant. The essays are spurred by their author’s profound involvement with the questions: WHAT IS A FACE? What did and what does it mean, culturally, socially, psychologically, physiologically, aesthetically, historically? What might it look like in the future? What are our assumptions about what a face represents, what it means to lose one’s face, or live with someone else’s face. Often enough, we think of faces as identities. But, what does a face tell about ‘us’ – individually, culturally, and as a species? Perception and imagination, the belief in images and image making, they all overlap in the face. The book’s trans-disciplinary approach is a first step toward a cultural history of the face. It includes essays by Jean-Claude Schmitt, Bernard Andrieu, Sigrid Weigel, Georges Didi-Huberman, Claudia Schmoelders, Jonathan Cole, and an interview with the facial surgeon Rainer Schmelzeisen.
Topoi, 2022
In this introduction we offer an overview of the 15 articles of the special issue What’s so special about faces? Visages at the crossroad between philosophy, semiotics and cognition, sorting them into five broad topics, i.e. (i) the attempt at overcoming the notion that there is a one-to-one mapping between certain emotions and facial expressions, (ii) the nature of some properties at play in face perception, (iii) the special status of faces (especially our own) in cognition, (iv) facial tools such as masks, (v) the socio-cultural meaning of represented faces.
From Puppet to Cyborg: Posthuman and Postmodern Retellings of the Pinocchio Myth
Doctoral thesis, UCL (University College London)., 2016
The myth of Pinocchio is the story of a puppet that desires to become human and achieves it with the power of his will. Created by Carlo Collodi in The Adventures of Pinocchio, the myth of Pinocchio is linked to the fairy tale tradition and is the most recent manifestation of the animate/inanimate archetype. This thesis is the first systematic study of the Pinocchio myth and examines how it has been used and reinterpreted in different retellings across different media and disciplines.