Phenomena of border and transgression in Yuri Lotman's research: ontological bases of the semiotic philosophy

The aim of the article is to disclose the philosophical potential of semiotics. To achieve this aim, it is necessary to raise and investigate the issue of the ontological bases of a semiotic approach, to explicate its connection with the general context of the historical-philosophical process. It is necessary to show that the semiotic philosophy as an emerging and developing direction of modern philosophical thought belongs to an essentially new philosophical paradigm, to an ontology of a new type. In this study, the author sets the objective to carry out a philosophical analysis of works of Yu.M. Lotman to explicate the ontological bases of the semiotic philosophy. The material of the study is the conceptual and theoretical developments of Lotman that possess not only literary, but also a considerable philosophical potential. The conceptual and methodological horizon the author uses is the concept "transgression" and the related concepts "border" and "ban". The term "transgression" is used in the article in the meaning of violation of the established borders, removal of the bans. The author shows that the phenomena of border, ban and violation not only function in the theoretical research of Lotman, but also act as the key moments of his conceptual developments. The author stresses that, according to Lotman, a fundamental contradiction representing basic ontological oppositions of the part and the whole, the single and the general, the individual and the universal, the final and the infinite, the limited and the unlimited emerges in the text. The tendency to isolation in the space of a literary text is complemented with a tendency to universality and, respectively, infinity. This contradiction creates tension necessary for the text to gain aesthetic and/or philosophical significance. Without this tension of the multidirectional orientations, the text as a work of art is impracticable. Existence of borders, allocating and structuring the text, is not enough: the text in this case will be a self-closed model of a certain part of the world. It will be a final expression of the final, a limited representation of the limited. But without a preliminary installation of all necessary borders, the text, as it has already been told above, also cannot exist. The transgressive overlap of various semantic fields in a literary text can take the form of an intersection of different points of view. Thereby, the perspective and polyphonic nature of life is approved in the text as a model of the universe. A conclusion is drawn that conceptual developments of Lotman have fundamental value not only for literary criticism, but also for philosophy. Lotman belongs to the circle of thinkers, whose works form a new paradigm of philosophical thought - transgression ontology.

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