COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
designate people not from the Middle Kingdom as "barbarians," but
merely as "foreigners." I seriously doubt it.
The central intended contribution of Liu's argument, often buried in
an océan of excess verbiage, appears to be the highly loaded coinage
"super-sign." Heretofore reserved for the famed circular electronic sign at
Times Square in Manhattan, from which many hâve read the latest news
for décades, Liu appropriâtes mis "Madison Avenue" term, apparently
inadvertently, for a différent purpose altogether. She defmes this odd
expression several times, first (on p. 13) as "a linguistic monstrosity that
thrives on the excess of its presumed meanings by virtue of being exposed
to, or thrown together with, foreign etymologies and foreign languages.
The super-sign escapes our attention because it is made to camouflage the
traces of that excess through normative etymological procédures and to
disavow the mutual exposure and transformation of the languages."
If this isn't terribly clear, it apparently was less tfian completely
transparent to the author herself who two paragraphs later tries again:
"What is a super-sign? Properly speaking, a super-sign is not a word but a
hetero-cultural signifying chain that crisscrosses the semantic fields of two
or more languages simultaneously and makes an impact on the meaning of
recognizable verbal units, whether mey be indigenous words, loanwords,
or any other discrète verbal phenomena that linguiste can identify within
particular languages or among them. The super-sign émerges out of the
interstices of existing languages across the abyss of phonetic and
idéographie différences."
Again, if this falls short of ample clarity, Liu tries a third time one
paragraph later (p. 14): "In short, the super-sign exemplifies the semiotic
opérations of translingual speech and writing by acting out the verbal unit
of one language and simultaneously displacing its signification onto a
foreign language or languages, always in what one might call an occulted
movement of thrown-togetherness." We shall return to what is going on
hère, if anyûung, but let us look at the prime example of the criminal
"super-sign."
Liu's second chapter, entitled "The Birth of a Super-Sign," détails
the principal culprit of her study. After a long citation from Black Skin,
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