Semiotics of Friendship: Relations Beyond Interactions
The 49th SSA Annual Conference
Charles University, Prague, Czechia, September 24–28, 2025
The Theme
The importance of friendship in the world today is undeniable. The notion of friendship – the very idea that leads to building bridges, enabling communication, and fostering understanding – remains at the heart of relationships as the cornerstone of cultures. It calls for the importance of
the other, the collective, and the social in a nurturing and cultivating way, giving voice to all participants in every scale of intelligent relations. The semiotics of friendship depends on our manner of living and on our relations with each other that expand over generations in an evolutionary process, and understanding the nature of relations is at the heart of the semiotics of friendship.
According to John Deely, interactions cease, but relations live on. Often not recognized as an element of reality, relations cannot be seen, heard, touched, or perceived directly by any of our senses. Relations are of an entirely different order from interactions, indifferent to distance in space or time. Relations of friendship, through love, not only convey the connections of humans to their environment (Umwelt) but also imply the meaning of being in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). The value of friendly interactions and their transcendent friendship-driven relations is the power to constantly and positively modify relationships, as Charles Peirce once put it, by altering the rules of self-control, actions, and experiences of the participants therein. The genuine relations of friendship among humans constitutes the desire for constantly seeking mutual fulfillment in the creation and experiencing, through the cultivation of friendship, further manifestations of evolutionary love.
Venue
The conference will take place at Charles University, in Prague, Czechia, from Wednesday,
September 24, to Sunday, September 28, 2025.
More about:
– The conference
– The Semiotic Society of America