The contagion in Brazilian semiotics: an issue of semio-historiography

Abstract

In this work, we seek to understand the concept of “sensitive”, more specifically the issue of contagion, in semiotics, through the semi-historiographical approach (Santos, 2020), contextualizing, at first, its emergence. Then, in the studies of French and Brazilian semioticians, recovered through groups of semiotics specialties – institutionalized in different universities in the international and Brazilian territories –, according to Murray’s (1994, 1998) and Moreira’s (2019) theories. These groups of specialties understood in the periods we call Greimasian and post-Greimasian are the reception of French semiotic theory from the founding discourse found in the works of A. J. Greimas and its continuity with his collaborators, especially in the works of Fontanille, Landowski, and Zilberberg. Allying the semiotic-historiographic principles defined by Portela (2018), Koerner (1996, 2014), Swiggers (2009, 2015), Moreira (2019), Santos (2020), and Auroux (2008) with the concept of “sensitive” in their conceptual network, we investigated in the Brazilian reception, to what extent contagion appears in the rhetoric and/or in the immanence of the analyzed works. Finally, departing from these first reflections, we were able to provisionally define the historical-epistemological place that the sensitive (contagion) occupies in Brazilian semiotics, to explore not only the theoretical and methodological continuities but also the existing ruptures.