The Tyranny of the Sign

The Birth and Demise of Saussure’s Semiology

De: Boris Kriger

Narrado por: Kathryn Roberts

This book is an inquiry into the tyranny of signs—into how language, once conceived as a tool for representing the world, became the very mechanism through which the world is structured, interpreted, and controlled.

Beginning with Saussure’s revelation that the relationship between word and thing is arbitrary, it follows the evolution of thought that led from structural linguistics to semiotics, from semiotics to poststructuralism, and from philosophy to contemporary systems of algorithmic signification. Along the way, it explores how signs detached from lived experience, replacing the real with its representations—how maps supplanted territories, codes replaced voices, and the sign itself became sovereign.

Drawing on Plato, Saussure, Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, and others, the book traces a philosophical lineage in which language ceases to reflect meaning and instead produces it. It exposes how faith, politics, economics, and technology have become fields of symbolic domination, governed not by truth but by structure.

Yet this is not a work of despair, but of reclamation. It calls for the restoration of awareness—the return of the sign to its rightful role as instrument, not idol; as bridge, not cage.

For only by remembering that the sign is our creation, not our master, can thought recover its freedom and speech its living breath.

Keywords
semiotics · language and power · philosophy of signs · structuralism and poststructuralism · Saussure and Derrida · symbolism and meaning · the philosophy of language

©2025 Boris Kriger (P)2025 Boris Kriger