Mieke Bal: Reading the World. The Urgency of Semiotic Thinking

»When I discovered the idea of semiotics, now decennia ago, my excitement about it concerned the integration of philosophy (thinking) and (close) analysis (doing), as well as the resistance against mediaessentialism and disciplinary constraints, with their methodological dogmas. Semiotics offers the possibility and tools to facilitate that integration, so that my passion for both, with teaching as an important third, could ease in as an activity that made sense—to use a semiotically relevant phrase to be taken literally as well as figuratively. On the side of philosophy, in addition to especially Spinoza, Bergson, and Deleuze, Theodor Adorno always accompanied my thinking. That attachment is due to his integration of socio-political wisdom with philosophical rigour. The mythical story of Cassandra, an antique case of #MeToo, enabled me to create a cinematic account of the doubts and struggles of a female figure whose loneliness was produced by the fate imposed by her employer Apollo whose sexual advances she rejected. She would see the future but never be believed.«

Mieke Bal, born in 1946, is a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist, and Professor Emerita in Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam, where she also co-founded the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.

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