Signs, Language and Listening. Semioethic Perspectives

A central problem in semiotics and philosophy of language is the problem of the other and the problem of the other is that of the word, the word as voice, recognized as the request for listening. At the interface with semiotics, philosophy of language turns to the “art of listening”. Listening is not external to the word, a concession, an initiative taken by the subject, but rather is no less than a constitutive element of the word which demands listening, understanding, a response and as such is always dialogic. This aspect of communication and the interpersonal relation is evidenced by semioethics, a special bend in sign studies particularly sensitive to the practice of listening understood in the medical sense as auscultation as much as the linguistic and semiophilosophical. We must listen to today’s globalized world and identify the symptoms of malaise over the planet – in social relations, international relations, in the life of the single individual, in the global spread of aggressive forms of technoscience functional to profit, with consequences for the entire ecosystem. The capacity for listening is a must for the future of globalization as an antidote against the race towards its very own destruction. We decide today for the future of semiotics, where “semiotics” is understood not only as the name of a science, but as a capacity specific to humanity, that for reflection on signs and decision making. The issue is not only of a theoretical order, but concerns semiotics as semeiotics and as semioethics.