This paper focuses its attention on dealing with a cartography of the body as one of the most important areas in semiotic research. This limited and partial cartography is meant to propose what we call Corposphere as one of the frontiers within the Lotman’s Semiosphere. The article starts from previous research (Finol & Finol, 2008), where some approaches based on Morris's three-dimensional semiotics are analyzed, and continue by proposing a list of sub areas where semiotics, anthropology, sociology and philosophy share a common heuristic interest.

The body identity is an important problem in itself as well as a term of reference for the problem of identity in general: the identity of an object, of a person, of a concept, of a nation, of a people, of a culture. In some respects, it may play a role similar to the role of Euclidean space for the understanding of other spaces occurring in science and in art or to the way in which natural languages are a term of reference in the study of other languages. The typology we are proposing in this paper is open to additions or modifications; it wants only to point out a possible approach and to suggest the complexity of the problem.

In this paper I propose to analyze the style of Nicolas Sarkozy, especially the media management of his body. While images of Sarkozy are released continuously in the media, these images show a very pragmatic strategy but also reveal a complex personal management of his body. According to the theoretical traditions based on the political anthropology, as far as the post-Barthes semiology, this paper analyzes semio-anthropological representations of Sarkozy’s body from a large corpus of all images in formal context to more broad images presented in public, which fills media space, including the immediately available Internet. The body is an important ‘tool’ for symbolic strategies of political leaders so that politics is embodied beyond the realm of ideas, where there is also the presentation of a physical style and presence. The systematic semiotic analysis of the political body is an exciting interdisciplinary field of study from both a theoretical point of view and the public perspective.

Especialmente a través de la publicidad, el cine y la televisión, la industria cultural norteamericana impone un ideal de belleza perfecta en el imaginario colectivo, que amenaza al hombre con la aniquilación del sí mismo. El objetivo central de este trabajo es explicar cómo la TV establece cánones de belleza por medio de series como Nip/Tuck, en la cual se presenta la tecnología de la belleza como herramienta principal del culto a la reconstrucción física de las personas, promoviendo así la referida aniquilación que se aprecia en el caso de figuras famosas como el desaparecido cantante Michael Jackson. Este análisis se hizo desde una perspectiva antroposemiótica y utilizando el método hipotético-deductivo. Entre los resultados se tiene el resurgimiento del mito de Narciso rebautizado como un neo-narcisismo hipervisible. En conclusión, el discurso de Nip/Tuck utiliza ciertas estrategias retóricas para manipular ideológicamente al receptor e imponerle un concepto hegemónico de belleza a manera de un régimen escópico, donde esos cuerpos re-creados con dicha tecnología son “naturalizados” y, por tanto, vistos como algo muy ‘normal’ en el mundo actual.

The text is a semiotic analysis of the act of bearing witness in a classic documentary on the Holocaust, Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985). What is the importance of the body, of the signs which are closest to it, namely, indexical signs, according to Peirce’s semiotic taxonomy for this kind of discourse? This perspective allows the author to approach a phenomenon that is described here as the act of “embodied witnessing”, a testimony in which the body plays as decisive a role as the words (symbols). In the two episodes of Shoah which are studied closely, the testimony of the witnesses is framed overtly or secretly in an iconic setting. The witness’s speech is set in a staging in which images play a key role; they mirror a past situation. Such a semiotic strategy is called here ‘indexical mimesis.’ This cinematographic technique functions as a catalyst for the revelation of the truth, through the emergence of indexical signs which otherwise would not be likely to manifest themselves in that cinematic context.

This article analyzes the historical variations of both pre-theoretical and theoretical thoughts of “incompleteness” and demonstrates the consequences that have led man to the state of incompleteness. In the new era, especially in the 20th century when it when it so happened that mankind reached a point where it is impossible to produce fullness incompleteness began to be expressed in social practices with a greater sense of ambivalence ever known since the Middle Ages. The science and art in the 20th century is unthinkable without division and re-construction of the human body in psychoanalysis, which reveals that man is the place for body and soul. Physical incompleteness, as reconstructing material in art and literature, is widely used as an aesthetic means of contemporary art. In the second half of the 20th century following the disappearance of contemporary art, the human body was absent, which was proved over a matter of time.

Peruvian painter Tilsa Tsuchiya (1929 - 1984), was consistently developing an organic painting style and while many contemporary Peruvian artists followed an abstract art-form, Tsuchiya did not fit into that trend. Although some art critics speak of surrealism in reference to her paintings, while others have been tempted to find a more native inspiration, Tsuchiya refused to be framed within one form or the other. Being convinced of the long process of finding a language within painting, she tried to follow her own path which was influenced by Eastern philosophies by producing a more metaphysical painting, in which one can observe a mystical spirit. However, it is neither Orientalism nor the possible foreign influences over locals in the painting. Rather, it is the representation of the body and eroticism, which is what was of primary interest. By plastic semiotics and semiotics of the body, this paper tries to answer such questions as how the physical dimension in the visual object works and what the links exist between eroticism and the mythical mean.

Organ donation is a complex semiotic space, controversial and contractual, a semiotic space of emotions and passions. Visual campaigns and graphic design are embedded in production networks of meaning and symbolic resistance. The relationship between image and sense of individual body and the social body is still today a complex and contradictory. These processes can reinterpret through the gift exchange and a generative view in which this social act is considered as a process of mutual transfer of value.

Media representation of the body is divided between two opposing views:1) the glorious body of advertising and in part of political discourse and, on the other hand, 2) the body abused by being overburdened with information, as in the body as is now experiencing of the limits of postmodern cinema. These representations show a body that is no longer in a defined place, which has no specific assigned place, and constantly oscillates between deficiency and excess. The body moves from one extreme to the other, most likely because the identities are neither stable nor secure within a given place. This paper analyzes to what extent the body functions there as a sign, with a certain autonomy, or refers to the identity previously known of, is the signifier of discomfort, or of an expression of emptiness. These questions are central to such discussion as the body appears as a place of resistance, a body in motion, leaving the norm may be obscene - offstage - breaking down barriers between public and private, between inside and outside, and leads to an ambivalent exaltation of the flesh.

The process of constructing an image such as in the action of collective memory allows the formation of images, linguistic expression, and processes of identity that leave their mark over the time. The narrative organization of a story adapts the corporeal visual unit to the distinct expressive substances and to the structural possibilities of the stories in their adaptation from literature to film and to telenovelas (soap opera). In each adaptation, changes are made where the intertextuality and the intersemiotics act as strategies in the interpretive cooperation of the receptor, using complex visual processes. The body emerges as a part of a semiotic material available to narrate the events and it becomes the principal organizer of the meaning. The body is the instrument and the means at the same time. The meanings of the concept of bodyness and the semantics matrixes are manifested in television fiction and are identifiable due to a semiotic analysis of the story. In this way we observe that it refers to a condition present in the body tha permits the identification as part of a process of perception.

Based on the idea that animation art materializes the world of animism, which is the epistemological approach of identifying the presence of spirits and the action of life within all things, it is essential to comprehend how the body, as a place where life manifests itself so that the ‘plausible impossible’ imagery of life continues, follows its own physics in animation, which has been refined through animation history. This paper tries to explain how the animated body is first formed, and then acts out, by analyzing the specific example of ani-body of Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie (1928) by Disney.