Lotman, Leibniz and the semiospheric monad. Lost pages from the archives

The present paper is the result of a research started in the Lotman Archives in Tallin, Estonia. Through an analysis of archival material, it aims at reconstructing the origins and meaning of the most political tropes of Lotman's theories, especially what I will call his theory of the political subject. In the first part, I will argue that, in order to understand this political aspect of Lotman, it is necessary to take into consideration the intellectual debates inside which the author started his intellectual journey in 1930s-1940s Soviet Russia, and how he sought answers to those debates in the works of G. W. Leibniz. In the final part of the paper, I will try to show how this reconstruction of Lotman's history could contribute to the contemporary debate in semiotics and other connected disciplines