Du sens II: passions between narrative semiotics and discursive semiotics

Abstract

The conception of passions, in the field of structural semiotics, is already from the beginning, in Structural Semantics (Greimas), until more recently in Semiotics of Passions (Greimas and Fontanille) marked by a double anchoring: an anchoring in the immanent system of narrative enunciates and modalities of being, and another anchoring in the discursive manifestation and the articulations between actions, interactions and passions. This study, centered on Du sens II, nevertheless navigates between the upstream and downstream of this work, including the authors (Coquet, Landowski) who have taken some distance from the narrative semiotics of Greimas. We can examine in detail the consequences of this tension between two different conceptions of passion, and this detail, as we will see, explains many of the difficulties already identified. But we must also try to resolve this tension, and more explicitly articulate the general system of available descriptors, and the particular categorical compositions (the semiotic regimes) of which the discursive manifestation is constituted.