Abiti di genere. Outer world e inner world tra azione, immaginazione e Phantasie

This paper aims at retracing and discussing a now almost thirty years old encounter between feminist philosophy, and a semiotics of subjectivity, and the Peircian theorization of the habit. In reading against the grain Teresa de Lauretis’ use of the category of habit – against the grain both of Peirce’s theorization and Feminist Theories - the paper aims at two main objectives: first of all to introduce into the debate on the actuality of Peirce’s semiotics the possibility of a study of subjectivities’ and identities’ construction and the way they are individually and collectively signified; secondly, to discuss how a cognitive and interpretative semiotics has still something to say, outside its strictly disciplinary boundaries, to the ways in which subjects, objects and their ‘significant’ relations can be thought of beyond neo-materialist and neo-realist epistemologies.