After the publication of Il nome della rosa, Umberto Eco replied to a journalist who asked where the author’s subjectivity could be found in the novel by saying that “the subject is in the adverbs.” What might have sounded like a witty remark was later interpreted by Patrizia Violi as an effective synthesis of an entire theoretical position on the theme of subjectivity, traceable throughout Eco’s intellectual trajectory.
The first explicit theorization of the subject appears in the Trattato di semiotica generale (1975). Although apparently marginal, subjectivity actually occupies the final pages of the volume, where it functions as a true theoretical conclusion. Eco himself observes that the subject had until then remained “absent,” a ghost continually eluded yet always evoked through the social praxis of sign production and the communicative nature of cultural phenomena.
In the final chapter of the Trattato, the subject is defined as a “way of segmenting the universe and associating expressive units with content units,” an activity that is both “historical and social” and coincides with the very process of semiosis. Eco describes it as composed of “historical-systemic concretions” that are “made and unmade without rest.” The subject thus identifies with the processes of creation and production of meaning — a perspective that Violi describes as “inherently Peircean.”
A similar formulation is found in Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio (1984), where the subject once again appears in relation to semiosis and is further connected to the notion of inference. If the sign, understood as identity, presupposes an objective code and a fixed subject, the sign as inference implies a subject that is “more mobile and more present.” In this perspective:
“The sign, as a moment (always in crisis) of the process of semiosis, is the instrument through which the subject itself is continuously constructed and deconstructed. (…) As subjects, we are what the form of the world produced by signs makes us to be.”
Violi emphasizes that the subject, insofar as it is semiosis, can neither be delimited nor fixed: it is a “diffuse configuration,” continually redefined by the historical and cultural practices of meaning production. It is, therefore, a dynamic subject, devoid of ontological stability, historically constituted as the result of significant practices.
Eco’s theoretical model, although not centered on enunciation theory, develops a conception of subjectivity that differs sharply from both empirical individualism and Husserlian transcendentalism. Precisely because Eco did not adhere to the classic models of enunciation, Violi notes, he avoided the “excesses of transcendentality” and instead proposed a notion of the subject as an effect of signification processes.
In summary, for Eco the subject is not a priori structure but the product of the historical and cultural dynamics of semiosis — a mobile operator tied to the production and transformation of meaning, and thus an integral part of the semiotic universe and of the encyclopedia.
Bibliographic reference: Patrizia Violi, “Il soggetto è negli avverbi”. Lo spazio della soggettività nella teoria semiotica di Umberto Eco, in Autour Umberto Eco. Signes, représentations, interpretations, Sofia, 2004. Published online January 7, 2005.