Semiotic thinking in general can be born when people become aware of the discrepancy and tension among different uses of language. This awareness and its expression are often enacted dramatically in the controversy of discourse. The discursive polemics in Pre-Qin China centers around the contention of logic and rhetoric, quite similar to the fortune of the trivium in the medieval West. Traditionally known as the Great Debate on Name and Substance, the controversy should be understood as a phenomenon of language pragmatics. Those who participate in the Debate fail to communicate with one another because there is a discrepancy between encoding and decoding. Their polemics helps to create a textual space that includes the hidden agenda of semiotics.

Early Chinese logic often seems puzzling because it is deeply rooted in an interplay of rhetoric and grammar. As logic in ancient China was more of persuading kings and dukes than of reasoning in epistemological terms, catching rhetoric seemed to be a short cut to instant fame. The elliptical Chinese syntax and semantic shift in word play often found in the logical texts underlie the perplexity. One of the logicians’ strategies is to employ a mutual interference of, in Jakobsonian terms, the metaphorical and metonymical axes, stopping the operation of each other to create bizarre statements. Another strategy is what Paul de Man would call the rhetoricization of grammar and the grammatization of rhetoric, which leaves the reader dangling between a literal and figural reading of the logical texts. New lights should be shed on early Chinese logic if one tries to look at it not in strictly logical, but in rhetorical and grammatical, terms.

The article offers re-reading of one of the most prominent writings on logic in ancient China notorious for its ambiguous and evasive nature—Gongsun Long’s Baima Iun—from the logical semantics and linguistic semiotics point of view. Previous interpretations of Baima Iun, which attributed to its alleged author either bringing in of abstract universals or introducing of nominalistic speculations into the philosophical debate of the day, serve as a point of departure for the interpretative theory based on re-examination of the two debating points in the contemporary philosophical discussion—Doctrine of Rectification of Names and Debate of Name and Substance. Present rereading suggests that Gongsun Long’s dialogue effectively challenges the Neo-Mohists’ non-problematic assessment of conditions needed for a successful logical discourse by stressing the key importance of a semiotic aspect of the logical reasoning. Moreover, the possibility of restating Gongsun Long’s arguments in the wording of Saussurean semiotics indicates the conceivability of Baima Iun’s interpretation as an implicit theory of linguistic signs.

Modern scholarship on Mozi has established an interpretative tradition of equating Mobian with logic. The present study takes issue with this tradition, criticizing its failure to locate the tension between logic and rhetoric in the Mohist art of disputa- tion. Indeed, when modern scholars draw a parallel between the Mohist practice of debate and Western logic, they generally do not take into account the tension between logic and rhetoric, either in the West or in Mobian. Overlooking this tension, Hu Shi thus reads the “Xiaoqu” chapter in Mozi as a treatise on logic. Drawing upon the history of logic and rhetoric’s development in the West, the present paper attempts to reveal Hu’s bias in emphasizing the elements of logic in his explication of “Xiaoqu.” To counterbalance Hus reading of “Xiaoqu’” in logical terms, this paper further highlights the rhetorical function of pi, mou, yuan, tui, four strategies of argument discussed in “Xiaoqu.” Pi, mou, yuan, tui are actually four methods of analogy that take advantage of superficial resemblance to influence one’s judgment of the argument’s logical validity. Exploring the convergence and divergence of logic and rhetoric in the Mohist “Xiaoqu,” it is hoped that we can arrive at a better understanding of Mobian.

To converse is simultaneously to divert language from itself and to invite language to encounter an insurmountable obstacle of developing complete meanings. A signifier in flight in its infinite detour leads us to the threshold of the linguistic labyrinth and that renders writing itself disastrous. An otherness, a mythic stranger in silence, exists in language itself that forever opens up a void, a zero-point or a veiled outside that dominates language in self-destruction, in an utter catastrophe. From Blanchot’s concept of writing, in his pursuit of this “empty” signifier, this otherness is sometimes a neutral void, or a creative force, and sometimes an evil power of death. It is a constitutive crack, a fissure that constitutes language itself in which the primordial signifier is forever missing. How we link this Blanchotian concept of the lost signifier with the Eastern concept of Dao 道 in Zhuangzi’s philosophy will be the main discussion of this short paper. To Zhuangzi, language or any conceptualized idea is a great hindrance to Dao, which remains what I would like to term it as “a metonymic otherness” to language itself. A gesture of neutrality or a detachment from the “buzzing voices’ of language would allow one to the silent horizon of Dao. This exterior void, a mute writing, conceals the whole consummation of self-knowledge, and the original reason or intelligence as spirit governs the body. Dao, an immobile exteriority containing the original reason beyond any empirical contemplation, certainly is quite different from the Blanchotian limit-experiences as encountering a pure form of the radical otherness when he gives Sade as an example. Zhuangzi’s neutral point or the mute writing as otherness on the way to Dao will not turn out to be Sade’s pure reason of sadism. Thus, this exteriority as otherness finds its difference in Zhuangzi and Blanchot, despite their similarities.

As a literary expression of the material infrastructure of the Han empire, Han fu is crisscrossed by both rhetorics and ethics. Despite its coded ethical endeavor, the suspicion of the fu's rhetorical excess remains unabated. However, the all-inclusive extravagance of Han fu witnesses the desire for the empire’s self-representation that renders the politico-historical Han reinscribed and reincarnated in the rhetorical order. This ethicopolitical dimension is foregrounded by the public nature of the fu’s themes and by the popularity of fu composition as well. Indeed, the tension of rhetoric and ethics needs to be cast in a new light. The sensuality and materiality of Han fu language reflect a certain reality of the time, thereby rendering the material display itself the true subject of the fu. As the ethical edification is bisected by the economy of rhetorics in the fu, the ethical intent becomes a rhetorical topos, which in turn has special ethical function in the socio-political context. Rhetoric and ethics are therefore both defining and defined by each other. It is this mutual implication that makes up the richness and complexities of Han fu.

The aim of this review article is to reflect on the methodology of comparative literature through Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory. The crucial and polemic point in both Ku’s and Kao’s books amounts to the relationships between Chinese literature and semiotic theories. Without speculating and defining their relations, the application of theories to the texts evades methodological or even epistemological aporia especially when theories and texts are conspicuously heterologous; both are what Peirce has called the First or monad which exists independently of others. In that sense, the violence of theories is manifest to a great extent. The problem is: what is to be saved, the text or object of analysis, or the analytical structure? Structuralism and semiotics seem to run into the dead end when the concept of “structure” or “system” becomes the target of criticism. But, the object can only be saved, not in itself, but in the other/Other, in the immanent negativity of the theoretical Other: salvation never exists outside though it is impossible without the outside. Peirce’s philosophy leads to a way to “inscribe” this possibility of dyadic salvation through Secondness or indexical copulation or articulation. Comparison, articulation or copulation is what Peirce has termed by “Thirdness” which, however, cannot be achieved except by establishing the “Firstness.” In the case of comparative literature, the separateness of the object from theories represents the condition of “Secondness.” To explicate the transformation of the First by the Second in order to achieve the Third is what I endeavour to accomplish here.