Bread Is Sacred, Bread Is Profane. This Bread of Ours, So Strange and So Familiar

Abstract

Anyone approaching the topic of “bread” cannot help but acknowledge the difficulty of summarizing their perspective on it, no matter how much they narrow the scope of their analysis. This article addresses that challenge via a semiotic and aesthetic reading of a classic work on bread: Heinrich Eduard Jacob’s 1944 book Six Thousands Years of Bread, and expanding the analysis to include recent Italian literary, historical, and philosophical studies. The result presented here centers on a constitutive feature of bread: its nature as a pliable sign – both in form and content. Described as a zero degree sign of its “writings,” bread appears either essentially or differentially marginal, depending on the grammars that encompass it, like a sort of thing in itself whose phenomenology is marked by constant reinvention.