[Coma: a new humanistic discipline].

Two researches merge together in this article: the former originates in coma clinical practice and aims at reaching a more abstract formulation, while the latter originates in the theory of narrative and tries to find practical applications. The interest of this merger lies in opening up a new field of study, comatics, whose object is to conceive the best possible conditions for comatose people, for specific varieties of comatose people and even for this or that individual comatose person to fit back into social life, which involves grasping meaning and clues and signals and signs, and finding one's way about in the circuit of communication. Comatics, in short, is semiotics as applied to awakening from comatose states.