Death as a semiotic event

Abstract

Death is certain. However, we spend our existence trying to avoid it. Since language is the symbolic process that makes us capable of understanding and signifying reality, the concept of death stands as an unrepresentable element, a meaning void, a receiver of numerous semantic investments that seek to fulfill it. Thus, a bibliographical research of the Greimasian Semiotics theory and other sciences such as Sociology and Psychology was carried out aiming to prompt reflections on the cultural unfoldings that impact the concepts of life and living and the modus vivendi of human beings through history, such as the way they evaluate the meaning of living/dying, their cultural productions around death and the change of their valuables during the narrative called “Life.” The main result of our research is that we better understand the production of meaning that the term death causes to the concept of life.