Daniele Monticelli: Crisis as/or Explosion? History in Juri Lotman’s later works

Semiosalong is the afterhours Tartu semiotic salon, active since 2011.

"Crisis as/or Explosion? History in Juri Lotman’s later works"

Daniele Monticelli is a professor of Translation Studies and Semiotics at Tallinn University. His research is characterized by a wide and interdisciplinary range of interests which include theoretical and literary semiotics, philosophy of language, translation history and contemporary critical theory. Professor Monticelli is currently the project leader of the group grant “Translation in History, Estonia 1850-2010: Agents, institutions, Texts and Practices” (2021-2025). He regularly publishes essays in Estonian cultural journals and is the author of several literary translations from Estonian into Italian. Here is the abstract for his talk:

This presentation reads Juri Lotman’s later works (1985–1993) against the background of the debates on historicity and temporality in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the USSR provoked a shift of attention in Lotman’s work from texts to historical processes that he considers from the point of view of change and novelty, paying particular attention to the place of human freedom and choice in history. The presentation will more specifically focus on Lotman’s notion of ‘explosion’ as a useful analytical tool for the study of historical crisis, in which unpredictability and indeterminacy seem to disallow our capacity for rational decision. It will be argued that the notion of explosion helps us to understand the individual and cultural mechanisms that activate in a state of crisis and to evidence the risks as well as the potentialities of the latter. Conceived in the climate of the 1989 revolutions, Lotman’s thoughts on unpredictability, change and freedom gain a new topicality in our times, when human history seems to have entered a phase of permanent crisis.

Here is the series theme description for History and Praxis:

History remains a central concern of semiotic inquiry for several reasons. It is often posed as a hypothesis that for something to be a sign and for someone to recognize it as such, there needs to be a sedimentation of effectively executed practices: a local ‘history’ of interactions that assure the preservation and transmission of knowledge. Theories of sign processes also often bring ‘history’ as a primordial component of the sign systems behind them; so that, for instance, a natural language is to be defined as a code “plus its history”. Simultaneously, semiotics is also anti-historicist: the synchronic method of Saussure is commonly thought to exclude the temporal, and the Russian Formalists disregarded everything outside the ‘text’ – particularly personal biography and context – in rebellion against the prevailing historical and material determinism of their day. But even they were concerned with the genesis of the phenomena under study, precisely in order to explain how it is that something comes to stand for something else. History entails praxis where signification structures intersect communication acts, and the concatenation of practices weaves the ‘proper’ fabric of history. But whose history? We invite participants this semester to reflect on this personal question and its inevitably political answers.

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