Papers by Despina-Alexandra Constantinidou OR Constantinides
Digital Age in Semiotics and Communication, 2024
The present paper explores the use of language teaching for educating students into becoming digi... more The present paper explores the use of language teaching for educating students into becoming digitally-literate citizens, as well as conscious, active members of the digital universe. The material discussed derives from the eLang project, a flagship project of the European Centre for Modern Languages. The guidelines, and real-world and reflexive tasks put together by the eLang team of experts, along with the theoretical framework employed are examined with respect to the notion of semiosphere by Juri M. Lotman, and the way this endorses digital transformation in language education. Seen, thus, as partaking in the digital semiosphere, and at the same time in the multiplicity of the semiotic systems ingrained in it, the current language student and future citizen assumes different roles, interacts with distinct as well as overlapping communities, is asked to make sense of multimodal resources, so as to eventually acquire far more than the skills of a digital user. The eLang material addresses, in this way, the demand for training language students in the multifarious literacies that digital literacy has come to encompass. The language student overrides, thus, classroom topography and the boundaries of conventional language education, and traces those of the globalised digital semiosphere, within which it cannot but soar.
SYN-THESES, Epistemology and Semiotics: Informationa and the Sign, 2023
This paper places the notion of paranoia at the heart of the ongoing process of exploring the rel... more This paper places the notion of paranoia at the heart of the ongoing process of exploring the relationship between epistemology and semiotics. Tracing the historical development of the concept of paranoia from a medical to a cultural term, the paper seeks to highlight the ways in which respective considerations about the mechanism for the creation of paranoid delirium have led to an epistemological approach to the concept of reality, the interpretation of its constituent signs and, ultimately, knowledge. The interwar era is the focal point of this exploration, as reality and knowledge of it were the backbone of the surrealist movement's challenge of the social establishment. The surrealists' claim to expand restrictive middle-class reality is the context in which Salvador Dali employed the mechanism of paranoia in order to examine the question of interpreting reality and managing the signs that make it up. Within the same historical-cultural context, the present paper explores Jacques Lacan's use of the same mechanism, as one that introduced him to the world of signs, with knowledge of paranoia giving way to the Lacanian "paranoid knowledge" and the subsequent adventure of the sign and ̶ above all ̶ of the signifier in his work. The contemporary use, especially in American politics and culture, of the term "paranoia" as a mechanism for interpreting signs in conspiracy theories confirms that the medical term is now ̶ almost entirely ̶ placed at the service of approaching and interpreting reality.
Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, 2001
This paper explores the notion of catastrophe as one that lies at the core of Georges Bataiile's ... more This paper explores the notion of catastrophe as one that lies at the core of Georges Bataiile's theory of excess. The term "catastrophe" is examined by Bataille within the context of deciphering the notions of "me" and "being", and it is defined as a state where being is revealed, while on the verge of dying. Catastrophe, thus, eludes denial, and reveals itself as a state of non-conlcusive and constant change, where limits are trasncended, yet asserted, overriden without being discarded. In his play, Judith, Howard Barker brings Bataillean catastrophe on stage as a means to trasngress the limits and restrictions that opress the human body and language. In Barker's "theatre of catastrophe", Bataillean being is hailed, through the very existence of violent death on stage.
Bodies, Theories, Cultures in the Post-Millenial Era, 2009
This paper examines the interface between psychoanalysis and the surrealist movement in the 1930s... more This paper examines the interface between psychoanalysis and the surrealist movement in the 1930s and early 1940s in France. Sanctioned on the part of the surrealists as early as 1924 in André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto, this interplay proved to be an ongoing process, which influenced most of the people who were at some time related to this group of avant-garde artists, including Salvador Dali. Employing The Secret Life of Salvador Dali as a starting point, the paper focuses on Dali’s conception of intra-uterine life, as well as its representation in his work in the 1930s. Life in the womb becomes a point of differentiation between Dali and the leaders of surrealism, mainly Breton, and a meeting point for the Catalan artist and the psychoanalytic trends in Paris between the wars. The paper explores the views of Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank and Jacques Lacan concerning intra-uterine life and the ways in which that partakes in the life of the individual, as these are expressed in the psychoanalytic texts known to Dali. Notions such as “inorganic state”, “trauma of birth”, death instincts and imago, are also explored, as they reverberate in Dali’s writings and paintings of the time.
Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism , 2010
This paper explores the way in which the cultural, psychiatric and psychoanalytic context of the... more This paper explores the way in which the cultural, psychiatric and psychoanalytic context of the 1930s acknowledged the potential of a specific mental illness, paranoia, to speak (of) individuality. The French surrealists, in particular, hailed a number of mental illnesses as an attempt at a flight from restrictive conventional meaning, that is meaning sanctified by the group or the mass. Among these mental states, paranoia was singled out by Salvador Dali, who utilized the paranoiac's mechanism of interpretation, in order to contrive a systematic procedure for projecting one's own way of interpreting, that is of assigning meaning to the objects of perception. The paranoid simulacra of Dali' s images of multiple figurations accommodated the unconscious of the individual, and were the outcome of the paranoid-critical method of interpretation that he devised. In this, he was assisted by Sigmund Freud's elaboration of paranoia, as well as the attention that paranoia had attracted in the psychiatric circles of 1930s Paris. Jacques Lacan's psychiatric treatise, in particular, was to confirm that the mechanism of the paranoid delirium assigned personal meaning to reality in a way that mediated the unconscious of the individual.
Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, 2013
The starting point of this paper, the extent to which Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is indebted ... more The starting point of this paper, the extent to which Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is indebted to Saussurean semiotics, is a widely established field of study. In fact, most critics agree that it was Jacques Lacan’s mis-reading of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the sign that determined Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and its approach to cultural texts. The present paper offers a theoretical and historical reasoning behind Lacan’s mis-reading of Saussure’s views about the nature of the signifier within a semiotic system, arguing that the Frenchman’s interaction with Salvador Dali in the 1930s played a decisive role in the use of structural semiotics for the proclaimed “return to Freud.” The concept of paranoia, the delirium of systematic interpretation of reality, served not only as common ground between the interwar work of the young psychiatrist and the surrealist artist, but essentially informed Lacan’s reading of Saussure. Thus, research in Lacan’s early writings and Dali’s 1930s art sheds new light on the origins of the “primacy of the signifier.”
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Papers by Despina-Alexandra Constantinidou OR Constantinides