Abstract

MARTINEZ-HERNAEZ, Ángel. El signo de los cinco: Las semióticas del síntoma y sus olvidos. Intersecciones antropol. [online]. 2014, vol.15, n.2, pp.353-362. ISSN 1850-373X.

This article develops an argument for recovering patient narratives from their erasure in classical semiotics. Taking as its point of departure the wellknown medical distinction between physical signs (objective symptoms) and symptoms (subjective symptoms), it analyzes how the symptom has been relegated to the status of physical sign in the work of de Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Peirce and, to a lesser extent, Eco. This has led semiotics to reproduce the biomedical naturalization of affliction, which is the product of the attribution of significance by the medical gaze. Nevertheless, symptoms are not reducible to physical signs; they are embedded in meaningful narratives. Rescuing the discursive subject of the symptom creates an epistemological shift in semiotics and in the anthropology of affliction.

Keywords : Semiotics; Biomedicine; Symptom; Medical Anthropology.

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