Bruno LaTour in the Semiotic Turn: An Inquiry Into the Networks of Meaning

This open access book highlights the link between Bruno Latour’s works and the semiotic perspective on social phenomena analysis. It identifies and relaunches a dialogue that was as heated as it was fruitful, but still little recognized within the social sciences. It asks why the theory of signification has so far been only sporadically acknowledged in literature derived from Latour’s work. Starting from these premises, the book explores two interrelated dimensions, the initial one of a ＂semiotics for Latour＂, which looks at concepts from semiotics in Latour’s study of social phenomena, and extensively for the first time, a symmetrical one of a ＂Latour for semiotics,＂ accounting for the impact of Latourian inquiry on contemporary semiotic research. The book offers a novel perspective on Bruno Latour’s work by addressing a wide readership, including those interested in Latour’s approach, actor-network theory, semiotics, and the social sciences.

The English translation of this book from the Italian original manuscript was done with the help of artificial intelligence, then revised technically and linguistically by the author in collaboration with a professional translator.

Paolo Peverini is Associate Professor at Luiss University. His scientific research concerns semiotics and social semiotics, with a focus on the analysis of the correlation between society, culture, and consumption. His latest publications investigate the mutual influence between the work of Bruno Latour and semiotics.

He has authored and co-authored several books and articles in international journals. He is general secretary of FedRoS (Romance Federation of Semiotics) and vice president of AISS (Italian Association for Semiotic Studies).

In 2017, he was appointed a Consultant to the Dicastery of Communication by His Holiness Pope Francis.