Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (1987)

Abstract

Brian Rotman’s monograph on the semiotics of zero is an unusual work for two reasons. First, it breaks the ever more damaging divorce between science and the analysis of culture by taking mathematics as the key system for its exploration of conceptual changes in the Renaissance: the introduction of the Hindu zero in mathematics, the development of perspective in painting, the development of imaginary money. Second, its characterisation of the fundamental alterations of signifying codes in the Renaissance is conceived not as an historical investigation finding its justification in the realms of influence and tradition but as a genuine semiotic study which links mathematics, painting and money through the tracing of formal similarities in their historical transformations.