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From Symbol to Icon: The Aesthetic Regime of the Meme in the Post-Discursive Age

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AI image Introduction: From Tweet to Meme Over the past decade, the landscape of digital communication has undergone a radical transformation. The era of brief, aphoristic tweets—where linguistic wit condensed virality into a few characters—seems to have given way to a new form of writing: the visual meme. Today, internet culture is no longer structured around text but around the image infused with affect. This passage from language to visuality marks a profound mutation in the economy of the sign—one that can be interpreted, following Peirce, Derrida, Baudrillard, and others, as a shift from symbol to icon, and more broadly, from logos to pathos . Contemporary virality is no longer measured by the argumentative strength of discourse, but by an image’s capacity to circulate, to affect, to provoke reaction. From political memes caricaturing public figures with Mexican hats to endless ironic variations on gestures or phrases, the sign has become instantaneous, plastic, and globally ...
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From Tweet to Meme: Derrida’s Grammatology in the Post-Discursive Age

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AI image Introduction: The New Hieroglyphs of Politics The digital landscape has shifted. A decade ago, the brief, aphoristic tweet reigned as the dominant form of online discourse — a remnant of the phonetic, linear tradition of writing. Today, however, the meme has overtaken it, establishing an aesthetic regime where images, captions, and icons define the rhythms of collective meaning. In the United States, political culture itself has become deeply visual: politicians appear in memes wearing Mexican hats, wielding maracas, or reimagined in pop-cultural tableaux. What once belonged to the margins — the comic, the pictorial, the non-discursive — now sets the tone of public debate. This inversion, seemingly trivial, recalls a deeper philosophical tension that Jacques Derrida traced in Of Grammatology (1967): the hierarchical opposition between phonetic and nonphonetic writing, between the linear voice and the graphic trace. The meme’s ascendancy thus signals not merely a shift in ...
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The Signature in the Age of AI: Derrida, Art, and the Paradox of Authenticity

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A Pair of Sneakers. In the style of Van Gogh. AI image Introduction The modern obsession with verifying authenticity—whether through passports, biometric scans, blockchain tokens, or signed certificates—echoes a paradox Jacques Derrida identified decades ago. In Signature Event Context (1972/1988), Derrida argued that a signature only functions if it can be repeated: “A written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context, that is, with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription” (p. 9). In other words, the very possibility of recognition depends on iterability—the capacity of a mark to be reproduced elsewhere, detached from its origin. This principle undermines the notion of pure originality. In a time of AI-generated art, deepfakes, and digital collectibles, Derrida’s insight feels uncannily prescient. Marks and Identity Identity has always been tied to external marks. To prove who I am, I produce documents bearing signatures, photograp...
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The Myth of the Author: From Homer to Barthes

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Troubadours by the Bonfire. AI image Introduction For centuries, the figure of the author has stood as a cornerstone of Western literary tradition. From antiquity to modernity, the creator has often been imagined as an isolated genius, capable of shaping entire worlds through sheer inspiration. Yet this romantic conception proves problematic when history is examined more closely. From the songs attributed to Homer to the theses of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, a different picture emerges: literature as a collective network, a web of voices and memories in which the individual subject dissolves. This essay traces that trajectory, showing how the “author” is less the origin of the text than a cultural construction designed to guarantee unity where multiplicity prevails. The Greeks and the Homeric Question Few figures embody the paradox of authorship better than Homer. Two of the most influential epics of world literature—the Iliad and the Odyssey —are traditionally attribute...
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The "Flipbook" States of Technology: Cultural Gestations and Future Revolutions

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The Flipbook of Today. AI art Introduction Great inventions rarely appear overnight. More often, they pass through a period of incubation, during which preliminary techniques or embryonic devices announce what is to come. Like in pregnancy, humanity experiences cultural “labor pains” before giving birth to a new technological era. A child turning the pages of a folioscope and laughing at a dog that seems to walk cannot imagine that he is handling the seed of cinema. In the same way, someone using Word’s predictive text or Google’s search suggestions twenty years ago could not have foreseen that this simple principle would eventually underpin today’s LLMs. This essay examines such early moments—cinema, artificial intelligence, the printing press—frames them within a broader theoretical perspective, and asks: what are the flipbooks of our own time? From Flipbook to Cinema: The Seed of Movement The flipbook, or “thumb cinema,” is a humble toy: a stack of drawings that, when flipped ...
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Illusion and Simulacrum: Nietzsche and Baudrillard on the Fate of Representation

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The status of signs. AI art Introduction The problem of how signs relate to reality has haunted philosophy since antiquity. In the twentieth century, Jean Baudrillard formulated one of the most radical diagnoses of this issue. In Simulacra and Simulation (1994), he proposed that images no longer reflect the world but instead generate their own reality through circulation. Friedrich Nietzsche, more than a century earlier, had already undermined the security of both language and art. In The Birth of Tragedy (1993), he showed how illusion saves humanity from destructive truths, while in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1999), he revealed that language consists of forgotten metaphors without any anchor in essences. Although Baudrillard often presents his theory as a historical transition from representation to simulation, the logic of illusion that Nietzsche described anticipates this shift and destabilizes any firm chronology. Their dialogue discloses both the necessity and dan...
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The Refusal of the Gaze: Vanessa Beecroft and the Dialectics of Looking

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Vanessa Beecroft´s tableaux vivants. AI art Introduction The gaze has long preoccupied philosophy and aesthetics as a force that does more than merely register the visible. To be looked at is not a neutral act but one that shapes, disturbs, and even constitutes subjectivity. Jean-Paul Sartre famously described how the presence of another’s eyes destabilizes the self, while Jacques Lacan identified the gaze as a rupture in the visual field that reveals our condition as objects for others. For women, the implications are particularly acute: the gaze has historically positioned them as passive spectacles rather than autonomous subjects. Against this backdrop, Vanessa Beecroft’s performance installations offer a provocative intervention. By instructing her female performers to withhold acknowledgment of their spectators, she stages a refusal of recognition that unsettles the traditional dynamics of the nude and the aesthetic act of looking. The Gaze and the Making of the Subject ...
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