Citationality

Janina Fenigsen

Janina Fenigsen

Brandeis University, USA

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Abstract

Citationality connects semiotic events interdiscursively by embedding a semiotic form derived from one event within another. Citationality is never only about an iteration of the semiotic form itself. It carries its prior contexts, actors, and performances across the events, conjuring claims and realms of relations, identities, and social frameworks as emergent in the new event. Citationality is important because it is performative. The approach to citationality proposed here follows Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler in attending to iterability of semiotic forms beyond those particular to language so as to include other kinds of semiotic events. It differs from their formulations in limiting the concept of citationality to those instances of iterability only that are characterized by reflexivity of their iterative nature, that is, by pointing to themselves as having been uttered before.

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