SIGN AS TRACE: DERRIDEAN DECONSTRUCTION IN THE CONTEXT OF CONTEMPORARY SEMIOTICS
Abstract
This article undertakes a critical rethinking of the category of the sign within the poststructuralist paradigm, by reviving Derrida's concept of the "trace" as the ontologically primary and simultaneously elusive foundation of semiosis. Drawing on key texts by Jacques Derrida (Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dispersion), the author demonstrates how deconstruction radically undermines the classical semiotic model from Saussure to Peirce and Eco, revealing the sign's inherent aporia its inescapable deferred nature, differentiality, and structural incompleteness. Particular attention is paid to the intersection of Derridian thought with contemporary trends in semiotics: poststructuralist semioanalytics, digital media semiotics, actor-network theory, as well as recent studies of material and non-human semiosis. Deconstruction appears here not as a methodological device, but as an ethical-political strategy of resistance to logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, which retains its critical edge in the era of algorithmic regimes of signification and simulative hyperrealities.