Semantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege to the Postmodern

In this major contribution to the critical endeavour of semantics and, more broadly, the philosophy of meaning, Horst Ruthrof has crafted a decisive missive addressed to a good gallery of philosophers, hermeneuticians, linguists, semiologists, and textual theorists who have come, during this past century and more, to influence the search for meaning. At a time when less than rigorous if not entirely lame, obscurantist or plainly mad incantations of continental philosophy have permeated textual and critical theory and their variants in the wider fields in the Humanities and social sciences, Ruthrof's critical observations and eloquent renderings of the key themes in theories of signification are both illuminating and salutary. Semantics in the Body is a sharp foil to much of what merely passes as radical theory today. Ruthrof's is the real deal.He is harsh on the fetishised surface phenomena of the postmodern, arguing that in the latter - this touted end point of history, the very relation of syntax to semantics (semantics is lost to the overly-syntactic rendering of surface)- a crisis inheres. Where reams of literature laud this surface phenomena in "often celebratory and emancipatory terms" (21), Ruthrof sees reflected merely a "control base" for a wholly divergent semantics, that of "the power structures of international capital"(21). What is missing from the postmodern account, he argues, is precisely the subject needed to apprehend any meaning that may in fact be lost to the surface that now simply reflects and re-reflects it. "If there is no prior basis for critique, statistics," argues Ruthrof, "no matter how elegant and complex, will not be able to provide one. Like statistics syntax needs to be told what to do .... The social is always available only as a semantics, its syntax being no more than the formalization of its skeletal dynamics. Importantly, one can always proceed from semantics to syntax but not vice versa. In the social, as in natural languages, one cannot reconstruct a semantics from a syntax"(229). In all this Ruthrof professes to offer no "counter-theory" in his own account of this struggle for semantics in the history of textuality. His critical sweep however is wide and deep enough to ground his notion of corporeality in such a significant and current philosophical context as to put that idea to rest. What emerges from Semantics and the Body is a powerful and lucid project which does significantly more than it proposes. While attempting to restore the body to meaning, reintegrate the subject in semiotics and modern philosophy, Professor Ruthrof engages whole generations of critics and philosophers, tackling them in the very modalities of their own game. A major work in its own right, this volume also serves as reliable guide to any who wish to either watch from the sidelines or get into the game themselves. Its attention to detail and the tight, dark alleys of over a century of difficult philosophy enliven that possi