Semiotic Animal (Roland Barthes)

Roland Barthes' semiotic animal explores the nexus between humans and animals, highlighting the role of animals in shaping cultural metaphors, myths, and identity. The cat, as a biotope, assimilates with various drives that reinforce the isotope of experiences. The cat's tendency for comfort is a radical perception of fantasy that delivers essential schemas of transcendence. By stressing on the desire for comfort in the cat, Barthes gives expression to his own desire for comfort, which he seeks in his mother.

Barthes presents the cat as an animal animated phantasmatic object that stands for the homey idea of "corner" that normally occurs between mother and child. The cat's relation with the space in the verb "to sleep" is an expression of "the pronominal I" that mirrors the self as sleeping. An interesting parallelism may also be drawn in the movement of animal and non-human animal, as Barthes walks towards a platform that is cat-like during a lecture at the College de France.

The structural difference with fixed nouns supplies the discursive prosopopeia (the figure of personification which is absent) where cat as a fictional character shows the ethological concerns analogous to cognitive and behavioral understanding. The function of the existential fantasy of self with the other (cat) as stereotyping becomes the foreclosure of truth. The difference of self and cat posits the uncanny hypothesis where cat acts as a pre-established machine for the repressive mechanism in self.

The Barthesian cat is anti-Cartesian in the sense that it covers a dual space both of the self and the other. This dual space generates a semantic ambiguity between "the correspondence" and "relation," i.e., cat/self. The cat looking for "stereotyping of the localization" suggests that it is an illusion of the sovereign good that can be idealized for that space. The indispensable schema for narrating the self through the expression of the cat, which is Heimlich (domestic, intimate, secret), becomes the subject that remains at the side of the mirror.

Cat represents Barthes's inner psychic space, playing between the real and the unreal. To Barthes, cat is the "objective co-relative" that correlates the self with the anonymous cat. The active semiology becomes the medium of conscious fantasies and serves as the hyper-individual level where Barthes speaks about the basic fantasy that is part of the personal history, aimed at the discursive line of flight. The transference of the self via the detour of writing becomes a mediating point for the symbolic reading of the text.

Lacan (1999) states that for objectification in psychological matters it is subject, at its very core, to a law of misrecognition that governs the subject not only as observed but also as observer.

Roland Barthes's metaphor of the dog as an extension of the self is a reflection on the wounds of Narcissism. The animal subject and wounds of Narcissism are seen as an extra-textual space that allows for a phantasmic reading of the self as the text. Barthes posits a binary between plant and animal to relate the space between utopia and heterotopia. The image of animal as narcissistic expression pierces the shafts of cognition and dissolution of the visualized disconnection from the real object. The subjective expression of the veiled self-identity is attained through active self-consciousness, where the difference of "self" is held by unraveling the truth that other animals bring to oneself.

Plant as a contingency of experience displays all focus of attention on its detail, while its meaninglessness strives for zero degree meaning. Barthes observes plant as a text that is also compared with animals, as they are conspicuous spectacles of pure effect. This comparison fills the lack of obtaining the desired object, as Barthes seeks to fill the empty space within himself with arbitrary linguistic sign.

Dog becomes a relevant trope to express the self, as it becomes the wound that flags the self via the functions of analogy of dog as "satori" of meaning. The magical presence of dog as a referent expresses the inexpressible being-there of the referent, which can only truly appear as "reality effect." The linguistic expression of dog is a central supplement to the "fundamental absence," as Barthes begins to remember the features of "dog" when it is absent.

Barthes's selection of the particular trope suggests that it is a continuation of a specific fantasy, which is also a reversal to the fantasy of the cat. Dogs are fascinating because they are like men without reason (and without madness). The discussion of dog with the "being saturated with man" suggests the annachronistic link with the self through the rhetorical trope.

Roland Barthes's work explores the concept of the animal as an object of affect for humans, arguing that it is the place one occupies rather than their psyche that is the subject of affect. The paradoxical fitting of the dog by Barthes is an expression of re-presenting the real, the fetish, and a lack where the perversion of self denies tearing the referent by reading one's own body. By representing the dog as a host of "real presence," Barthes attempts to extrapolate the provocation of other and memory that leads to the transformation of self.

The linguistic autonomy of accounting the dog as "our animal" represents the symbolic order of the real. Barthes's personal "biographemes" articulate the problem of existence between three registers introduced by Jacques Lacan: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. The expression of dog and cat becomes both the condensation and displacement, acting as a "psychotic experience" of reality. Thus, the imaginary relationship between the dog and the self is established through psychotic experience that builds up mediation between the self and the idea.

Barthes's digression toward distinction of "the animal from the beast" associates him with the metonymic signifier, where the beast-like signifier is a metaphor to men. This constitution of the personal code causes symptomatic storehouses of mutilated images. Barthes considers animals to be "having a soul" that posits affect on humans, and every symptom and every oniric symbol is a compromise.

Barthes offers the supplementary crack for reading the obssessional production of "diffuse affective" that is hysteric in nature. The hysteric self-identity isrendered with the "shimmering," which is a specific and rare affective mode. Dog as a site of desire is condemned as a denomination of the realized animal in the self, confirming the singularity of the being.

The recurrent trope of "Dog" in Barthes is a metonymic signifier of self suggesting the two-fold of a Dasein. By drawing parallelism between "haiku" and "dog," Barthes attempts to sense the co-relation between the self and the environment. Through the 'dog' metaphor, Barthes believes that aesthetic judgment has a liberatory critical power that complements the more deterministic type of thought found in cognition and morality.