The essay discusses the limits of interpretation, reflecting on the tensions between openness and limit, power and freedom, truth and drift. It puts in dialogue hermeneutics and semiotic perspectives and points out its convergences and divergences, focusing on Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics, Jauss's Aesthetics of Reception, the Semiotics of Reception developed by Umberto Eco and the Semiology. The theoretical field of the latter includes the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and the School of Yale, represented by Jonathan Culler, J. Hillis Miller and Harold Bloom.