Critical Theory and Semiotics: Contributions from Latin America to a Marxist Discussion

Abstract

How is it possible to understand a specific cultural determination of human praxis, especially the productive and consumptive one, without falling into ethnologising human subjects in their everyday forms of reproduction, or construct biological fixations? The former senior faculty of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) Bolívar Echeverría (Riobamba, Ecuador 1941-Mexico City 2010), who does not limit human culture to its “elevated” forms and bases his analysis in the precise manner of material reproduction, finds an adequate image of this relationship between freedom and tradition, between individuality and a historically- and geographically-determined collectivity. This image lies in human languages, their innumerable speech acts and in a science that studies the relation of interdependence among them: semiotics. Starting from that concrete philosophical problem, retaking Saussure’s conceptual proposals and confronting them philosophically with Marx’s and Echeverría’s theories, we try to construct a basis for a critical epistemological contribution from the Global South, overcoming in that way one of the most powerful and destructive rests of the old colonial processes: “intellectual” Eurocentrism

Keywords

• language
• faculty of speech
• productive consumption
• instrument of labour
• use value