The term ‘Empty Sign’ occupies a peculiar and contested position within the depth-psychology corpus, operating simultaneously across semiotic, astrological, Buddhist, and ontological registers. In astrological literature — most explicitly in Sasportas — the empty sign designates a zodiacal sign present within a house yet untenanted by any planet; far from being negligible, the empty sign’s cusp ruler may serve as a focal point of the entire chart pattern, and its house may supply the missing leg of a T-square configuration, rendering apparent absence a site of latent psychological significance. This astrological usage resonates strikingly with Buddhist and Taoist deployments of productive emptiness: Zimmer’s reading of early Buddhist sculpture presents the absent Buddha as a ‘bubble of emptiness’ whose footprints mark a real but unrepresentable presence — an empty sign in the strictest semiotic sense, a signifier whose referent cannot be depicted without distorting it. Benveniste’s structural-linguistic distinctions, McGilchrist’s engagement with the Japanese concept of ma, and Jung’s citation of the Tao Te Ching’s utility-of-nothing all converge on the same paradox: the sign evacuated of positive content may exert its greatest formative force precisely through that evacuation. The corpus thus presents the Empty Sign not as a deficiency but as a structural necessity — the hollow of the wheel, the silence between notes, the throne on which no body sits.
we should not overlook the significance of so-called empty houses. Should the planet ruling the sign on the cusp of an empty house be the focal point for a particular chart shaping
Sasportas argues that an untenanted house — governed by an empty sign — may nonetheless be psychologically central when its ruling planet occupies a structurally dominant position in the chart.
, The Twelve Houses: An Introduction to the Houses in Astrological Interpretation, 1985thesis
one is to think of the Buddha as truly there, on the throne of Enlightenment, but as though he were a bubble of emptiness. Footprints on the ground and a slight hollowing of the cushion betray his presence
Zimmer identifies early Buddhist iconography as a deliberate practice of the empty sign: the Buddha’s presence is real but rendered only through negative traces, because any positive depiction would falsify his liberated essence.
, Philosophies of India, 1951thesis
“Nothing” is evidently “meaning” or “purpose,” and it is only called Nothing because it does not appear in the world of the senses, but is only its organizer.
Jung, glossing the Tao Te Ching, argues that apparent emptiness within a sign or symbol is not absence of meaning but its invisible organisational ground.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960thesis
Ma is the depth that is expressed by reticence, silence, what is not said; it is a space that is the opposite of empty.
McGilchrist’s treatment of the Japanese concept of ma theorises the empty sign as a generative interval whose apparent vacancy is in fact saturated with formative energy.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Isaac Stern described music as ‘that little bit between each note – silences which give the form’… The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole.
This passage supports the empty-sign concept by gathering cross-cultural testimony that the unsignified interval — absence of positive content — is what confers structure on the whole.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the charioteer is to be seen holding an umbrella over a prince who is not there.
Campbell documents the early Buddhist artistic convention of representing the Buddha as an empty sign — a vacancy surrounded by attending figures — as the sole adequate emblem of transcendence.
, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962thesis
God as negatio negationis is simultaneously total emptiness and supreme fullness.
McGilchrist, drawing on Eckhart and Lurianic Kabbalah, frames the empty sign as a coincidence of opposites — a signifier whose vacuity is identical with maximal ontological content.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the ancient Indian idea of śnya, which is behind the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness, has two self-consistent but mutually i
McGilchrist links the mathematical zero and Buddhist śūnyatā to a structural logic in which the empty sign carries paradoxically self-consistent dual valencies.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The sign is an individual and social notion (and not a universal one, as in Peirce). In Saussure, reflection bears upon the language from three points of view
Benveniste’s differentiation of Saussurean from Peircean sign-theory provides the semiological backdrop against which the empty sign — a sign without individuated referential content — can be theoretically located.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
if one judges ‘Since the men familiar to us are mortal, men everywhere are mortal too,’ meaning that mortality belongs to the men familiar to us in some other, accidental way, the judgement will be empty.
Long and Sedley’s account of Epicurean sign-inference identifies the ‘empty’ judgement as one whose signifier lacks a necessary internal relation to its referent — an ancient philosophical anticipation of the empty-sign problem.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
the shape of the plant as a whole was determined in some way by the negative space around which the leaves unfold.
Hillman invokes Goethe’s morphology to suggest that formative power resides in emptiness — negative space governs organic shape as the empty sign governs the surrounding signifying field.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995aside
Nothing, like Being, is no thing. Neither is it the mere absence of a thing: it is a subject of action, Heidegger implies (it positively ‘noths’).
McGilchrist’s reading of Heidegger’s nichten treats ontological nothing as an active, structuring force — a philosophical corollary to the empty sign’s generative function.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside