Emancipation of the Sign: Poetry and Finance During the Twentieth Century

The subject does not belong to the world, rather it is a limit of the world.” 

Language has an infinite potency, but the exercise of language happens in finite conditions of history and existence.

Nevertheless, while social communication is a limited process, language is boundless: its potentiality is not restricted to the limits of the signified. Poetry is language’s excess, the signifier disentangled from the limits of the signified.

Irony, the ethical form of the excessive power of language, is the infinite game words play to create, disrupt, and shuffle meaning. A social movement, at the end of the day, should use irony as semiotic insolvency, as a mechanism to untangle language, behavior, and action from the limits of symbolic debt.

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From “A Place We Do Not Know” in Franco Berardi’s new book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, published by Semiotext(e), 2012.