Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World

by Robert S. Corrington

Semiotic theory, which has restricted its focus largely to human forms of significations, is transformed by Robert S. Corrington into a semiotics of nature itself. Corrington situates the divide between "nature naturing" and "nature natured" within the contest of classical American pragmaticism and postmodern psychoanalysis. At the heart of this new metaphysics is an insistence that all signs participate in larger orders of meaning that are natural and religious. Meanings embodied in nature point beyond nature to the mystery inherent in positioned codes and signs.

Hardcover

First published April 1, 1994

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here is a book in search of readers adequate to its conceptions. I am not (yet) such a reader, unfortunately. I do not understand this book. It gives a highly developed theory of semiosis as natural process, but it offers little in the way of argumentation or explanation that is not already embedded within and assumes the rest of the theory. This self-referentiality makes the book (for me) pretty opaque. If I knew Peirce’s semiotics, and semiotic theory more generally, it might help. Or maybe not. I found Corrington’s previous book, Nature and Spirit, challenging, too, but not quite so inaccessible.