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Article published In: Dialogue and Ethics
Edited by Ronald C. Arnett and François Cooren
[Language and Dialogue 7:1] 2017
► pp. 80–99

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Communicative Ethics

The phenomenological sense of semioethics

 | Duquesne University (USA)
Published online: 29 June 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.7.1.06arn
Abstract
This essay examines the importance of semioethics in relationship to the work of Levinas. The interplay of semioethics and Levinas’s commitment to “ethics as first philosophy” announces the communicative height and weight of a semiotic signification that demands responsive human action. Semioethics is a communicative act that wades through the plethora of signs in the global communication production system with the objective of discerning signs of ill health that curtail care of life. Semioethics necessitates attentiveness and responsiveness to Otherness and difference. Semioethics functions as resistance, the unwillingness to accept and abide within an unreflective communication production system composed of taken-for-granted sameness of process and procedure.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A brief survey of semioethics
  • 3.The a priori roots of semioethics
  • 4.Sebeok and existential semiotic resistance
  • 5.Levinas: Otherwise than imposition
  • Notes
  • References
References (37)
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