Content area
Full Text
What is the domain of a semiotics of deception? Upon a first approximation it seems that it is the intention of the subject who deliberately uses signs deceitfully. Semiotics would overlap with psychology as a science of intentions, or with political science as the study of rhetoric in power relations. But evidently such overlaps must be dismissed, for semiotics concerns itself with signs. Should the specific behavioral disciplines be reduced to a semiotic theory? Whether semiotics is the cornerstone of the social and human sciences, or whether it is at least autonomous, standing side by side with its sister disciplines, it must account for that thing for which the sign is perceived as being the proxy. And the thing that complements the notion of sign may be ungraspable from a semiotic point of view.
The domain of a semiotics of deception is not in the subject's intention, but in a certain ambiguity inhering in the semeion itself. The users of signs-in their political exchanges or expressing their psychological motivation-would do nothing more than draw on that which is deceitful beforehand. A politically naive or a psychologically healthy sign user would still be bound to the deception indigenous to the sign. If psychological or political deception can be pointed out and perhaps corrected, semiotic deception cannot, for it would arise from the inevitably ambiguous functions of signification which are already constitutive of the semeion. How can there be deception in the absence of a background of candor? Semiotically adumbrated deception becomes ethically neutral, less the devilish accomplishment of rhetorical cunning than the unavoidable bane of the intrinsically imperfect sign. The intellectual tradition which embraces skepticism about the process of signification in modern and postmodern discourses is that which begins with Nietzsche and culminates with Derrida. Others may prefer other apices, such as Foucault and Lyotard, but I shall go along with Derrida because he expresses himself directly about the nature of the sign. I shall pursue an answer to the question of whether Derrida's ideas about the linguistic sign authorize the development of a semiotics of deception. But before we turn to Derrida on sign, let us bury the subject whom we have already impugned as a locus of deception and an object of interest for...