These essays define the new philosophical field of existential semiotics. Existential semiotics involves an "a priori" state of signs and their fixation into objective entities. There is a hermeneutic and phenomenological aspect to the work. Its sources are in Husserl, Schutz, Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Heidegger. As a member of the Paris School of Semiotics (A.J. Greimas in particular), Tarasti is seeking less categorical, less Cartesian approaches. He sees semiotics in transition, shift, rupture and flux, something which is becoming rather than being. His theoretical ideas are illustratd with examples from high culture - painting, music and literature - as well as from current day media and popular culture, including landscapes, gastronomy, novels, Walt Disney, film advertising as narratives, and post-colonial practices. Signs are examined in their interdisciplinary as well as intertextual connections.