Umberto Eco Zitate

seite 2

zitiert bei: Nina Werlberger. Der Bürger als Verweigerer. ZUKUNFT 12/2010 http://diezukunft.at/?p=1843
Original engl.: "I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages." - vor dem University Club of Chicago. Zitiert bei: Anthony Haden-Guest. Of Eco and E-mail. The New Yorker 26. Juni 1995 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/06/26/1995_06_26_058_TNY_CARDS_000369998

Foucault's Pendulum

Das Denken ist ständige Wachsamkeit http://www.zeit.de/1993/45/das-denken-ist-staendige-wachsamkeit?page=all. Ein Gespräch mit Umberto Eco. Aus dem Französischen von Uli Aumüller. DIE ZEIT, 5. November 1993 Nr. 45.
Original französisch: " [...] pour être tolérant il faut fixer les limites de l'intolérable." - Roger Pol Droit. Un entretien avec Umberto Eco. La pensée est une vigilance continuelle. LE MONDE 5 octobre 1993

Streichholzbriefe. Übersetzer: Burkhart Kroeber. Hanser 1990, S. 19 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=bKEqAQAAMAAJ&q=weisheit

The Name of the Rose

Interpretazione e sovrainterpretazione: Un dibattito con Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler e Christine Brooke-Rose

Il cimitero di Praga

N'espérez pas vous débarrasser des livres

Il cimitero di Praga

Nachschrift zum »Namen der Rose«, dtv, ISBN 3-423-10552-6; Übersetzer: Burkhart Kroeber
Original italienisch: "L'autore dovrebbe morire dopo aver scritto. Per non disturbare il cammino del testo." -Postille a Il nome della rosa. Bompiani, 1984. p. 10

Die Suche nach der vollkommenen Sprache, Verlag C. H. Beck, München, 1994, S. 336 ISBN 978-3406378881; Übersetzer: Burkhart Kroeber
Original italienisch: "L'Esperanto dunque potrebbe funzionare come lingua internazionale per le stesse ragioni per cui, nel corso dei secoli, la stessa funzione è stata svolta da lingue naturali come il greco, il latino, il francese, l'inglese o lo swahili" - La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea. Edizione Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1993. p. 356

Umberto Eco, Jean-Claude Carrière, Stephen Jay Gould, Jean Delumeau: "Das Ende der Zeiten", DuMont Verlag Köln 1999, ISBN 3-7701-4882-7, S. 275

Ur-Fascism (1995)
Kontext: The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

[4] Symbol, 4.4 : The symbolic mode, 4.4.4 : The Kabalistic drift
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: Scholem … says that Jewish mystics have always tried to project their own thought into the biblical texts; as a matter of fact, every unexpressible reading of a symbolic machinery depends on such a projective attitude. In the reading of the Holy Text according to the symbolic mode, "letters and names are not conventional means of communication. They are far more. Each one of them represents a concentration of energy and expresses a wealth of meaning which cannot be translated, or not fully at least, into human language" [On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1960); Eng. tr., p. 36]. For the Kabalist, the fact that God expresses Himself, even though His utterances are beyond any human insight, is more important than any specific and coded meaning His words can convey.
The Zohar says that "in any word shine a thousand lights" (3.202a). The unlimitedness of the sense of a text is due to the free combinations of its signifiers, which in that text are linked together as they are only accidentally but which could be combined differently.

[3] Metaphor, 3.12. Conclusions
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: No algorithm exists for the metaphor, nor can a metaphor be produced by means of a computer's precise instructions, no matter what the volume of organized information to be fed in. The success of a metaphor is a function of the sociocultural format of the interpreting subjects' encyclopedia. In this perspective, metaphors are produced solely on the basis of a rich cultural framework, on the basis, that is, of a universe of content that is already organized into networks of interpretants, which decide (semiotically) the identities and differences of properties. At the same time, content universe, whose format postulates itself not as rigidly hierarchized but, rather, according to Model Q, alone derives from the metaphorical production and interpretation the opportunity to restructure itself into new nodes of similarity and dissimilarity.

[O] : Introduction, 0.8
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: A general semiotics studies the whole of the human signifying activity — languages — and languages are what constitutes human beings as such, that is, as semiotic animals. It studies and describes languages through languages. By studying the human signifying activity it influences its course. A general semiotics transforms, for the very fact of its theoretical claim, its own object.

[4] Symbol
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: What is a symbol? Etymologically speaking, the word σύμβολον comes from σνμβάλλω, to throw-with, to make something coincide with something else: a symbol was originally an identification mark made up of two halves of a coin or of a medal. Two halves of the same thing, either one standing for the other, both becoming, however, fully effective only when they matched to make up, again, the original whole. … in the original concept of symbol, there is the suggestion of a final recomposition. Etymologies, however, do not necessarily tell the truth — or, at least, they tell the truth, in terms of historical, not of structural, semantics. What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a 'final' meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is always beyond one's reach.

As quoted in "Of Eco And E-mail" by Anthony Haden-Guest, in The New Yorker (26 June 1995) http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/06/26/of-eco-and-e-mail

[O] : Introduction, 0.2
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: The principle of interpretation says that "a sign is something by knowing which we know something more" (Peirce). The Peircean idea of semiosis is the idea of an infinite process of interpretation. It seems that the symbolic mode is the paramount example of this possibility.
However, interpretation is not reducible to the responses elicited by the textual strategies accorded to the symbolic mode. The interpretation of metaphors shifts from the univocality of catachreses to the open possibilities offered by inventive metaphors. Many texts have undoubtedly many possible senses, but it is still possible to decide which one has to be selected if one approaches the text in the light of a given topic, as well as it is possible to tell of certain texts how many isotopies they display.

[I] Signs, 1.2.2
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: The sign is a gesture produced with the intention of communicating, that is, in order to transmit one's representation or inner state to another being. The existence of a certain rule (a code) enabling both the sender and the addressee to understand the manifestation in the same way must, of course, be presupposed if the transmission is to be successful; in this sense, navy flags, street signs, signboards, trademarks, labels, emblems, coats of arms, and letters are taken to be signs.<!-- Dictionaries and cultivated language must at this point agree and take as signs also words, that is, the elements of verbal language. In all the cases examined here, the relationship between the and that for which it stands seems to be less adventurous than for the first category.

[O] : Introduction, O.I.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: The sign is usually considered as a correlation between a signifier and a signified (or between expression and content) and therefore as an action between pairs. Semiosis is, according to Peirce, "an action, or influence, which is, or involves, an operation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into an action between pairs".

[4] Symbol, 4.4 : The symbolic mode, 4.4.4 : The Kabalistic drift
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: Scholem … says that Jewish mystics have always tried to project their own thought into the biblical texts; as a matter of fact, every unexpressible reading of a symbolic machinery depends on such a projective attitude. In the reading of the Holy Text according to the symbolic mode, "letters and names are not conventional means of communication. They are far more. Each one of them represents a concentration of energy and expresses a wealth of meaning which cannot be translated, or not fully at least, into human language" [On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1960); Eng. tr., p. 36]. For the Kabalist, the fact that God expresses Himself, even though His utterances are beyond any human insight, is more important than any specific and coded meaning His words can convey.
The Zohar says that "in any word shine a thousand lights" (3.202a). The unlimitedness of the sense of a text is due to the free combinations of its signifiers, which in that text are linked together as they are only accidentally but which could be combined differently.

Ur-Fascism (1995)
Kontext: The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

[O] : Introduction, 0.8
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: A general semiotics studies the whole of the human signifying activity — languages — and languages are what constitutes human beings as such, that is, as semiotic animals. It studies and describes languages through languages. By studying the human signifying activity it influences its course. A general semiotics transforms, for the very fact of its theoretical claim, its own object.

Ur-Fascism (1995)
Kontext: [Ur-Fascism] depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering's alleged statement ("When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," "universities are a nest of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

[O] : Introduction, 0.4
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: A specific semiotics is, or aims at being, the 'grammar' of a particular sign system, and proves to be successful insofar as it describes a given field of communicative phenomena as ruled by a system of signification. Thus there are 'grammars' of the American Sign Language, of traffic signals, of a playing-card 'matrix' for different games or of a particular game (for instance, poker). These systems can be studied from a syntactic, a semantic, or a pragmatic point of view.

[O] : Introduction, 0.8
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: Certainly, the categories posited by a general semiotics can prove their power insofar as they provide a satisfactory working hypothesis to specific semiotics. However, they can also allow one to look at the whole of human activity from a coherent point of view. To see human beings as signifying animals — even outside the practice of verbal language — and to see that their ability to produce and to interpret signs, as well as their ability to draw inferences, is rooted in the same cognitive structures, represent a way to give form to our experience. There are obviously other philosophical approaches, but I think that this one deserves some effort.

[O] : Introduction, 0.6
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: When semiotics posits such concepts as 'sign', it does not act like a science; it acts like philosophy when it posits such abstractions as subject, good and evil, truth or revolution. Now, a philosophy is not a science, because its assertions cannot be empirically tested … Philosophical entities exist only insofar as they have been philosophically posited. Outside their philosophical framework, the empirical data that a philosophy organizes lose every possible unity and cohesion.
To walk, to make love, to sleep, to refrain from doing something, to give food to someone else, to eat roast beef on Friday — each is either a physical event or the absence of a physical event, or a relation between two or more physical events. However, each becomes an instance of good, bad, or neutral behavior within a given philosophical framework. Outside such a framework, to eat roast beef is radically different from making love, and making love is always the same sort of activity independent of the legal status of the partners. From a given philosophical point of view, both to eat roast beef on Friday and to make love to x can become instances of 'sin', whereas both to give food to someone and to make love to у can become instances of virtuous action.
Good or bad are theoretical stipulations according to which, by a philosophical decision, many scattered instances of the most different facts or acts become the same thing. It is interesting to remark that also the notions of 'object', 'phenomenon', or 'natural kind', as used by the natural sciences, share the same philosophical nature. This is certainly not the case of specific semiotics or of a human science such as cultural anthropology.

[4] Symbol, 4.4 : The symbolic mode, 4.4.4 : The Kabalistic drift
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Kontext: Scholem … says that Jewish mystics have always tried to project their own thought into the biblical texts; as a matter of fact, every unexpressible reading of a symbolic machinery depends on such a projective attitude. In the reading of the Holy Text according to the symbolic mode, "letters and names are not conventional means of communication. They are far more. Each one of them represents a concentration of energy and expresses a wealth of meaning which cannot be translated, or not fully at least, into human language" [On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1960); Eng. tr., p. 36]. For the Kabalist, the fact that God expresses Himself, even though His utterances are beyond any human insight, is more important than any specific and coded meaning His words can convey.
The Zohar says that "in any word shine a thousand lights" (3.202a). The unlimitedness of the sense of a text is due to the free combinations of its signifiers, which in that text are linked together as they are only accidentally but which could be combined differently.

Quelle: The Prague Cemetery

Quelle: The Name of the Rose (1980)

Quelle: Postscript to the Name of the Rose

Quelle: The Name of the Rose (Everyman's Library

Quelle: The Name of the Rose

Quelle: Baudolino

Quelle: Foucault's Pendulum

Quelle: Foucault's Pendulum