After the publication of The Name of the Rose, in response to a question from a journalist who asked him if he was able to locate the subjectivity of the author in his novel, Umberto Eco replied: “The subject is in the adverbs.” It would be an error to interpret this reply as a mere witty quip, a playful sidestep to avoid a rather silly question. on the contrary, I believe his reply efficiently synthesizes an articulated theoretical position on the theme of subjectivity that we can trace throughout the entire body of Eco's theoretical works. In this chapter I should like to reinterpret this body of work, reconstructing several crucial parts of it and proposing an interpretation that is perhaps a bit unorthodox.

Eco's first theoretical discussion of the subject may be found in A Theory of Semiotics (Italian edition) from 1975. At first glance, subjectivity plays a marginal role in this work, since its focus is primarily on the modalities of production and representation of signs. only a few pages (less than five, to be exact, in a volume of more than three hundred pages) are devoted to the subject, but a more careful reading quickly overturns this initial impression. In fact, these few pages are the final pages of the volume representing Eco's theoretical conclusions, and constitute a closing chapter entitled “The Subject of Semiotics” where, in Eco's words, this “sort of ghostly presence, until now somewhat removed from the present discourse, finally makes an unavoidable appearance. what is, in the semiotic framework, the place of the acting subject of every semiosic act?” (Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, p. 314).