Review of "After the Semiosphere"

A book by Laura Gherlone on J.M. Lotman’s dialogic semiotics of culture

Abstract

If the urgency of our times is “to rethink thought”, the intellectual legacy of Jurij M. Lotman, the founder and highest expert of the “semiotics school of Moscow-Tartu”, shows itself to be of value today. Fruit of a rigorous and passionate work in this field, the book published by Laura Gherlone addresses – as the author herself writes – “the last changing of skin that Lotman elaborated from the second half of the Eighties up until 1993, proposing a science of culture ever more open and interdisciplinary. It is about focusing attention, through a convergence of suitable approaches, upon what Lotman himself, beginning in 1984, describes with the term semiosphere. One can only rejoice that twenty years after his death we are presented with a work that provides the key elements to appreciate the contribution of Lotman not only towards a semiotics of culture, but towards an overall recomposition of the human sciences as a whole.