Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1
Ph.D student in Arabic language and literature in Semnan University
2
Associate Professor, Department of Arabic Language and Literature, Semnan University, Semnan, Iran.
3
Associate Professor, Department of Arabic Language and Literature, Semnan University
10.48311/lrr.2026.119309.83095
Abstract
From its inception, semiotics has continually sought new anchor points of meaning, wherein meaning is never fixed, unipolar, or determinate; rather, it is always a site of doubt, displacement, and generativity. Existential semiotics is one of the modern methods for investigating how meaning is produced and received, founded by Eero Tarasti. From this perspective, meaning is indeterminate and plural, emerging in the process of living, experience, and the subject's consciousness. Drawing on the insights of this theory, as well as the approaches of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, which considers bodily consciousness as the center of meaning production, the present study examines how meaning is formed in the lived experience of an unnamed subject's migration from Lebanon to France and entry into a new world in the novel The Al-HayyAl-Latini. The final moments of the subject's migration in Souheil Idriss’s novel The Al-HayyAl-Latini are analyzed. Employing a descriptive-analytical method, the study introduces migration as a bodily lived experience and a clear example of semiotic sublimation, achieved through a movement of negation and affirmation, from non-being to being. Migration in this novel is not a goal-oriented action, but a bodily and existential experience of "becoming," accompanied by the collapse of meaning, the rupture between body and world, and existential suspension. The anonymity of the character shifts the narrative from a logic of action to a sensory-perceptual experience and a crisis of subjectivity. The radical negation of values, while leading to emptiness .
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