The Return of the Barbarians: Semiotic Borders and the Demystification of Cultural Complexes in the Figure of the Viking

Abstract

Through a genealogy of "the barbarian", certain textualities make visible a topology that shows the boundaries of what is expressible or not about the alleged existence of a particular type of pre-men living in an (un)cultural and wild world: figures of the barbaric that reflect an attempt at ordering, a struggle against entropy and chaos and a mechanism of rationalization of a cultural-Other, resulting in intercultural problems still existing in some contemporary texts. In this paper, we are interested in addressing their contemporary representations, through one of its most recurrent modelization: the Viking. But, why does a
cultural text as the Viking remain even centuries later? What subjectivities are woven from certain recurrences, repetitions and refractions that revitalize an atavism and barbarity in apparently civilized humans? Which semiotics fracture inscribes a difference on the treatment of the “wild” other that becomes visible in some current enunciations? In the field of cultural semiotics, we understand that it is possible to shed light on these questions based on how, through certain semiotic operations, meanings are transformed and selected, defining otherness and formulating a map of senses around a Viking construction. Thus, in its various present representations, we can visualize a trope produced by an amalgam of senses and imaginaries that manifest figures located outside civilization: that is, a polyaccented and mythical construction that interweaves with the great problems of Western culture and embodies an imaginary capable of reworking and translating new readings that reterritorialize the opposition identity/otherness through a process of textual integration.