The absent I — On consciousness without subjects, love without vulnerability, and media without mirrors
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This essay examines four recent publications — a biosemiotic model of consciousness, a bioethical proposal for moral enhancement through love drugs, a comparative media study of CNN's dual-language coverage of the 2023 Gaza war, and an analysis of historical narrative in Egyptian children's media — as symptoms of a single structural failure: the systematic evacuation of the subject from discourses that claim to address consciousness, morality, media, and technology. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic realism and extending it through the phonomorphological methodology of the Stimmfreiheit project, the essay argues that the human being is a living, multimodal sign whose presence demands answer. It proposes that the sequence of nature, art, culture, and science — in that order — is the condition for any system, from bacterial cultures to artificial intelligence, to sustain itself without producing destruction.
Author: Spisländer, Fatima C.
Institution: University of Würzburg
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7142729195
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