Geneviève Calbris’ semiotic study of French gestures began in the 1970s and shows how gestural signs interface between the concrete and the abstract. Created by analogical links originating in physical experience of the world via processes of mimesis and metonymy, they are activated by contexts of use and constitute diverse semantic constructions: Gesture is able to evoke several notions alternatively (polysemy) or simultaneously (polysign). As expressions of perceptual schemas extracted from physical experience, they prefigure concepts. A Saussurean perspective brings to light relations between physical features of gestures (signifiers) and the notions (signifieds) they are apt to evoke; it reveals signifiers that are common to different gestures (paradigmatic axis of substitution) and how signifiers interweave in gestural sequencing (syntagmatic axis of combination). Gesture expresses, animates, explains, synthesizes information, and anticipates speech. We highlight its utterance functions, its simultaneous multireferentiality, the gestural anticipation of verbal information, and the interplay of tension-relaxation between conversation partners that this can create.

Chapter 5 engages with Barthes’s tact by situating it within a philosophical landscape that expands from the West (Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche) to the East (Kakuzō, Suzuki). In so doing, I reconstruct how Barthes explores the connection between human sociability and intellectual productivity in view of its hermeneutic potential. I show that Barthes’s alternative practice of critical inquiry bears striking resemblance to Adorno’s idea of hermeneutical tact. I argue that Barthes’s notion of tact, although unfashionable in the 1970s, is crucial to ongoing debates that challenge the hermeneutic of suspicion (Gadamer, Ricœur) and transgress the limits of critique (Felski). I also question, however, if the essentially democratic idea of a tactful hermeneutics first introduced by Kant truly translates into Barthes’s, Adorno’s and Gadamer’s theories. Tact, they jointly contend, cannot be taught. Unlike politeness, it must be lived. The elitism this idea implies, and its implicit vicinity to the Romantic idea of the genius, give rise to the suspicion that, while aiming to suspend any class-oriented conceptions of tact, in the end, this may be precisely what their theories help to reproduce.

First-time seizures are a common part of neurology practice. Making an accurate and specific diagnosis is achievable by taking an excellent history. Clinicians should keep in mind that seizures are only part of the differential in a patient with a first-time event, with other diagnoses like syncope common as well. This history should focus on what the seizure feels like to the patient and looks like to observers. Two classification systems, the seizure semiology and International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE), exist to make communicating complex information easier. Key semiology history includes the presence or absence of auras, altered awareness, or convulsions. In addition to history, laboratory, EEG, and imaging data can inform to the specific patient diagnosis. If you determine that the patient has had a first-time seizure without a clear epilepsy diagnosis, you can tell them seizure that the recurrence risk is 40%. If you determine the patient has epilepsy, you can tell them that 50% of people are seizure-free with the first medication used. Patients should be reassured that they can live normal lives with most jobs being obtainable and family life being a possibility if the patient so chooses.

Hypermotor seizures primarily arise from the frontal lobe; however, they have been shown to arise outside the frontal lobe in up to a third of patients. The insular cortex can be part of the hypermotor seizure network, acting either as a diffusion zone or as the seat of the seizure onset zone. Most patients experience predominantly nocturnal seizures with complex and stereotyped hypermotor behaviors with or without tonic or dystonic features. Although the hypermotor semiology of a seizure originating from the insulo-opercular region is often indistinguishable from that of a frontal onset, certain clinical features are paramount in recognizing an extra-frontal onset. In this chapter, we will review electro-clinical findings and semiology patterns of hypermotor seizures that suggest an insulo-opercular onset.

Insular lobe seizures (ILS) may present with several subjective and objective symptoms. Somatosensory and viscerosensory symptoms, notably paresthesia and laryngeal constriction, are symptoms frequently encountered with ILS. Other manifestations may become only evident after the ictal discharge spreads to extra-insular structures. Depending on propagation pathways, ILS exhibit two main clinical patterns: (1) a perisylvian /temporo-perisylvian pattern and (2) a frontal-like pattern. Other miscellaneous clinical presentations include epileptic spasms, ecstatic, gelastic, reflex, and autonomic seizures.

Most communications in early colonial America were not written down. Even if, following recent scholarly trends, we understand the Western notion of “writing” broadly – as including all forms of inscribed human communication – nonverbal exchanges still carry most of our human-to-human signals. How, then, do we study early American interactions between Natives and newcomers if so much of what we must rely upon as analysts goes unspoken? This chapter describes the methodological and ethical challenges of early colonial North American historiography based on other-than-linguistic evidence in three media domains: Indigenous media of the colonial era; human relations to and movement in landscape; and the environment as an agential force.

Dante’s unitary vision, for all its immediacy, is a vision of mediation through language and its constitutive binaries. This is demonstrated in terms of Saussurian linguistics, but the principle had been anticipated with sophistication by the semiological and language-theoretical consciousness of the Middle Ages in ways that Dante particularly develops and foregrounds. Moreover, the post-structuralist turn in which meaning is generated no longer just internally to the system of language by diacritical difference but depends on relation to an Other outside the system is also eminently embodied in Dante’s theological understanding of language. Only relation to the absolute Other of divinity can lend language its meaningfulness. Every system must relate to other systems in order to have any meaning at all, and this is structurally equivalent to referring all meaning to God.