One Piece! Towards a figural semiopraxis of freedom

In this paper, I adopt the manga One Piece by Eiichirō Oda as a theoretical object and a model in order to develop some theoretical remarks on semiosis. Firstly, I discuss Oda’s writing device of narrative repetition, that I frame as a figural pro cess of retrospective fulfillment of sense where different stories interact. Then, I reconstruct the theme of 自由 (freedom) in the diegesis, on three different re gimes of valorization: morality, sociopolitical power and nature. What emerges from the survey is that in the achievement of every declination of freedom actions and stories, whose combined effect is to renegotiate values, play a key role. I pro pose that freedom in One Piece is the condition for and the result of (re)creating one’s own 伝説 (legend), i.e. an enacted story, which makes action a semiopraxis. I therefore define a semiopraxis as an enunciate with a narrative structure which precedes its own actual enunciation, that can also remain forever virtual. I there fore claim that narrative repetitions in One Piece can be considered a depiction semiopraxis. Then, I focus on Oda’s characters whose concept is that of a trick ster (most notably, the protagonist Monkey D. Luffy), as instances of the zero of a semiotic structure, which allows any transformation of values to take place. I con clude that One Piece can be considered an effort to delve into the ways through which comics can expose figurality, the capacity of a semiotic token to be both itself and other, and hence to free from any unilateral narration.