 Peirce’s advantage is that he attends to both sides of the internal-external divide, furnishing “the link between semiosis and reality, between signification and concrete action” (1984, 175). And yet, for de Lauretis, Peirce’s work is not sufficient by itself because it lacks a well-developed notion of the unconscious. Thus de Lauretis’s self-appointed task is to negotiate the problems and promises of all these approaches by means of a pragmatist semiotics, creating a “theoretical overlap” (1984, 168) between Kristeva’s internalist and Eco’s externalist semiotics, as well as between Freud’s privatized and Foucault’s social sexual subject. Put another way, de Lauretis joins Freud with Peirce—admittedly “even stranger bedfellows than Marx and Freud” (1984, 215 n31)—to explore how the semiotic junction between psychic interior and social exterior produces the unconscious habits that create sexual subjects.