The Body and its Envelopes: from Psychoanalysis to the Semiotics of the Body

Abstract

While searching for the semiotic figures of the body, the semiotician should take two complementary paths: the study of concrete discourses on the one hand and, on the other, the study of the meta-discourses that within man’s sciences, propose models with a strong semantic tendency.

In psychoanalysis, the body is a center of energy and pulsations starting from which the pychism generates its own borders. Asing on the notion of “psychic barriers” proposed by Freud and in accordance with as much the psychological as the philosophical tradition that had elaborated the concept of “coenaesthesia,” Didier Anzieu has constructed a theory of “skin ego” that from the semiotic point of view, bears two principal dimensions: (i) that of the functions of the skin ego considered as a topological border which consist of administering the stimuli, movements and the forces that come from the exterior and the interior of the sentient body and (ii) that of the “formal signifiers” that affect the material and figurative representation of said border and that “register themselves” in some way on the immaterial surface.

The analysis of the modal and spatial properties of this barrier-envelope leads us towards a recognition of two principal figures: (i) the container whose properties of compactness of connectedness and of filtration permit it to assure the permanence and distinction of the ego at the same time that the centrifugal and centripetal selections that regukate the interchanges with the non-ego, and (ii) the inscription surface, the true support for semiotic expression upon which the different operations taken on by the envelope leave interpretable marks.

The body-envelope (container of the signified and the surface of inscription of the signifiers) is nothing more than one of the possible configurations of the semiotic body, albeit one of the principal ones, since it permits linking in an informal manner the observable properties of the actor with the immanent properties of the actant.