The Seba library treats Signature in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Abraham, Lyndy, Dane Rudhyar, Derrida, Jacques).
the theory that nature has put a mark or ‘signature’ on every natural object, providing a clue to the ‘virtue’ or property contained within that object. These signs were perceived to be woven into the tapestry of nature by the hand of God
Abraham defines the alchemical doctrine of signatures as a divinely inscribed hermeneutic system in which every natural object carries an outward mark that reveals its inner occult virtue.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis
Every feature of a situation or of a person is read as a ‘Signature’ of the life which is focalized in and through it. The medieval alchemists laid a
Rudhyar transplants the alchemical doctrine of signatures into astrological depth-psychology, proposing that the seer reads every outer feature as a hieroglyph disclosing the inner life-principle focalized within a person or situation.
In written utterances (or ‘inscriptions’), by his appending his signature (this has to be done because, of course, written utterances are not tethered to their origin in the way spoken ones are)
Derrida, via Austin, establishes that the written signature functions as a substitute origin—a graphematic anchor that compensates for the untethering of written utterance from its living source.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
Eurycleia identifies Odysseus not by his face or his voice but by the scar on his thigh—permanent testimony to an ancient wound endured… Thomas demands to see ‘the mark of the nails’
Peterson reads the bodily wound—scar or nail-mark—as a somatic signature authenticating the hero’s identity through the permanence of suffering undergone rather than through presence or voice.
, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025supporting
the philosopher does not find anything in heaven and earth which he does not also find in man, and the physician does not find anything in man which heaven and earth do not have. And these two differ only in outward form
Jung cites Paracelsus’s microcosm-macrocosm principle—the theoretical foundation of the doctrine of signatures—as the basis for synchronistic correspondences between inner psychic reality and outer natural form.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting
would a performative statement be possible if a citational doubling did not eventually split, dissociate from itself the pure singularity of the event?
Derrida’s analysis of the performative’s iterability provides the philosophical background for understanding why the signature, as a mark claiming singular originary authority, is always already split from itself.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside