The semiotic impulse: experimenting with Peirce’s diagrammatic love

ABSTRACT This article explores the relevance of Peirce’s cosmological concept of love for politics, focusing on its expression as an evolutionary process of semiosis. More specifically, it argues that in Peircean semiotics love becomes the impulse motivating the creation of signs but without resorting to a transcendental structure that would attribute the source of their meaning to the human subject. Rather, it is shown that if love is said to be creative at all, this is only to the extent that it is a metaphysical diagram by which nature signifies itself into manifold worlds. The first part of this paper traces the articulation of diagrammatic love in Peirce’s naturalised concept of the sign as part of his response to the dilemma between construction and reality concerning the interpretation of experimental phenomena. The metaphysical and methodological consequences of this response are then taken up in relation to a different articulation of the same dilemma, this time implying that in order for love to be political it would either have to lose its cosmic character or else its relevance for human concerns. As a conclusion, the paper explores the potential link between diagrammatic love as experimental ethics of semiosis with what has come to be known as the “cosmopolitical proposal”, exemplified in the work of Isabelle Stengers.