Los sentidos del ser querido fallecido. La categoría vida-muerte en los universos sociales

The semiotics of culture is built on the cosmological category Nature/Culture. It has considered less important the existential category Life/Death, that frequently refers only to individual semantic universes. Anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, history, hermeneutics have long investigated how cultures question the relationships between living and dying. Here we will try to take a step forward in semiotics by examining the condition of mourning, as a strategy by which cultures, with their languages and institutions, elaborate a vital, albeit fragile, not only of the sense of mortality, but of humanity itself at a transgenerational level. In particular, by analyzing Ishiuchi Miyako’s series of photographs Mother’s 2000- 2005: Traces of the Future (2005), we will explore the “reluctance” that people have in accepting the deceased’s disappearance and their frantic search for his senses: smells, breath, voice, touch, sight, flavors. People, in fact, do not resign themselves to lose their loved ones, and try to fill their lack by the attachment to the dead’s personal objects, which they transform into fetishes in an attempt to keep the contact alive. And they inaugurate an ambiguous cultural time, for those who stay and those who go, of no longer there but still there.