Generazione dei testi e irresponsabilità d’enunciazione

Viruses are entities placed at the very limit between the living and the inanimate, indefinite from the point of view of their agentive dimension, biologically incomplete and non–autonomous, devoted to contamination and hybridization: for these resons they are available to several semantic investments. However, we can outline two directions main direction, at first glance distant from each other and lacking in affinity. The first one has given rise, in science fiction, to a large number of narrative of catastrophic and unstoppable epidemics—typically attributed, according to the romantic model, to some scientist who went beyond the limits of rationality and of the humanely controllable. The other direction, instead, leads to the metaphorical identification of a form of communication insistently called “viral”. Based on two movie–texts of particular interest, this essay first intends to show how the two directions of symbolic development can be subtly related, and then to analyze the mechanism of viral diffusion in less superficial and more semiotically founded terms. These reflections, on the one hand, criticize forms of enunciation that tend to deny the very presence of a point of origin of the discourse, and, on the other hand, can lead to rethinking textual processes in an unusual key: the texts, then, no longer appear to us as autonomous entities generated by their internal forces, but constructed according to a trans–textual process based on forms — far from trivial— of replication, variation, and hybridization.