SOURCE: “Putting Out the Light: Semantic Indeterminacy and the Deconstitution of Self in Othello,” in English Studies, Vol. 75, No. 2, March, 1994, pp. 110-22.

In the essay below, Lucking explores Othello's attempts to assess and define his identity.

One of the cardinal tenets underpinning contemporary theory in the fields of linguistics, semiotics and literary criticism is that enunciated in Saussure's famous assertion that the relation between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one. Although this intuition is by now indelibly associated with the author of its most celebrated formulation, very clear anticipations of the notion can be detected in the literature of preceding centuries.¹ While the statements to which I am referring are predominantly philosophical in character, in the case of certain works the arbitrary nature of signification does not constitute a theoretical problem only, but is conceived instead as entailing potentially far-reaching consequences for all human beings. We are...