Tra lavoro e linguaggio: l’oggetto come segno

Abstract

In Cognitivism, Structuralism and Analytic Philosophy, the problem of action has never been accurately investigated. Previous literature refers to “action” as an “execution”, “act de parole” or “speech act”. In all these concepts action is only a linguistic performance. Our aim is to analyze how we can find a more radical sense of “action” in Marx and Hegel. In the studies of these philosophers the term “action” can be understood as “work”, that is, a practice-sensible activity. Human work is a species-specific capacity which represents the ability of producing the objects of human world. Since the human work is intrinsically linguistic, the produced objects are potentially symbolic. Objects will send back to something else out of themselves, to the practice-sensible activity, from which they are produced. Therefore, to understand the symbolic dimension of some objects we have to refer to the practice-sensible actions that are intrinsically linguistic but not only linguistic.