Dao and Sign in History: Daoist Arche-Semiotics in Ancient and Medieval China (SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture)

From its earliest origins in the Dao De Jing , Daoism has been known as a movement that is skeptical of the ability of language to fully express the truth. While many scholars have compared the earliest works of Daoism to language-skeptical movements in twentieth-century European philosophy and have debated to what degree early Daoism does or does not resemble these recent movements, Daniel Fried breaks new ground by examining a much broader array of Daoist materials from ancient and medieval China and showing how these works influenced ideas about language in medieval religion, literature, and politics. Through an extended comparison with a broad sample of European philosophical works, the book explores how ideas about language grow out of a given historical moment and advances a larger argument about how philosophical and religious ideas cannot be divided into content and context. Contents Preface Introduction: Defining “Arche‐-Semiotics” The Sign, Unscienced The Subjective Premise: The School of Names The Historical Premise: A Treasury of Traces A Method for Différance Chapter Outline Part One: Daoist Semiotics in Comparative Perspective Chapter One: Ways through Language The Blank that Cannot be Blanked The Rise of the Wordless The Laozi and History Dao and Dasein Formal Guests of History Chapter Two: Ways beyond Language The Sign of Virtue Complete The Historical Zhuangzi The Poststructuralist Zhuangzi Levinas: The Horror of Silence Three Versions of Non-Daoist Non-Articulation The Strange Dialogue of Speech and Silence Part Two: Daoist Semiotics in Early Medieval Culture Chapter Three Tracing the Obscure History and Trace Decay and Authority The Seven Worthies of the Arche-Semiotic Grove Hiding in Language: Ji Kang and Ruan Ji After the End Arche-writing and the Monarchical Chapter Four Traces of Transcendence Signs of Power (I) The Celestial Masters: Marks of the Elect Ge Hong and the Southern Turn The Marriage of Spirit and Text: The Shangqing School Signs of Power (II) Chapter Five Sign, Translation, Enlightenment Translation as an Ethics of Debt Seng Zhao and the Buddhification of Lao-Zhuang Arche-Semiotics North-South Arche-Semiotics: Daoan, Huiyuan, and Zhu Daosheng From Arche-Semiotics to Poetry: Xie Lingyun Translation as the Face of the Other Chapter Six The Arche-Semiotic Mind and the Carving of Dragons The Text as Debt, and the Textuality of Ethics The Nothingness outside the Text The Text-Mind and the Absent Author The Dangerous Supplement, Always-Already the Source Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index "From its earliest origins in the Dao De Jing of Laozi, Daoism has been a known as a movement that is skeptical of the ability of language to fully express the truth. While many scholars have compared the earliest works of Daoism to language-skeptical movements in twentieth-century European philosophy and have debated to what degree early Daoism does or does not resemble these recent movements, Daniel Fried breaks new ground by examining a much broader array of Daoist materials from ancient and medieval China and showing how these works influenced ideas about language in medieval religion, literature, and politics. Through an extended comparison with a broad sample of European philosophical works, Dao and Sign in History explores how ideas about language grow out of a given historical moment and advances a larger argument about how philosophical and religious ideas cannot be divided into "content" and "context"-- Provided by publisher Daniel Fried is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, and is President of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature.