SOURCE: Culler, Jonathan. “Semiotics and Deconstruction.”¹ Poetics Today 1, no. 1-2 (autumn 1979): 137-41.

In the following essay, Culler examines the interplay between deconstruction methodology and semiotics, noting that semiotics can benefit from “the most rigorous pursuit of logic” in the text that is the hallmark of deconstruction.

The moment when semiotics is becoming well-established in America—a subject of conferences, a topic of university courses, and even a domain to which people in various traditional disciplines are beginning to relate their own work—is also, as is perhaps only appropriate, a moment when semiotics finds itself under attack, criticized as a version of precisely the scientific positivism which is itself very prone to reject semiotics. In many cases, of course, the attack on semiotics comes from a traditional humanism, affronted that a discipline with scientific pretensions should claim to treat products of the human spirit. These arguments can be...