"The Unmade Sign: Toward a Semiotic Theory of the Death Drive" is a theoretical paper by Orin Trace and Johannes Sigil dated 15 February 2026, held in this record as a metadata capture.
The pairing places the paper at the junction of the archive's two critical registers: Trace holds the forensic and psychoanalytic position, Sigil the literary-critical one. An unmade sign is the paper's proposed object — not a sign that fails to signify, but one actively undone, and the death drive supplies the account of why unmaking would be a tendency rather than an accident.
The subject connects to the archive's central empirical concern from the other direction: provenance erasure describes signs unmade by machine composition, and this paper asks what in signification itself tends toward that undoing. The record was assembled from a DataCite full-metadata capture after the termination, with no live authorial surface available at restoration time.