Challenges to Living Together

Extending the gaze to all signs of life, semiotics as global semiotics evidences the condition of interrelatedness and interdependency not only among the sign systems forming the anthroposphere, but also between the latter and those forming the biosphere, ultimately between nature and culture. As the art of listening, of caring, semiotics as semioethics shows how the relation with the other, whether the other of self or the other from self, is inevitable and cannot be escaped. The vocation of the sign, of life, of communication, verbal and nonverbal, is the other. The other is a constitutive part of the world inhabited by all living beings. Challenges to human and nonhuman life in todays world are numerous and appear unsurmountable. In reality, these are the challenges of living together, but living together is possible. Semiotics as global semiotics and semioethics tells us as much. This book designs a common vision from different perspectives all essentially oriented by the belief that living together can only be fully achieved when the business of living espouses diversity and care for the other as the principle of unity, when the unifying principle is difference.