Sémiotique : Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (HU Linguistique) (French Edition)

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The semiotic theory of passions sets itself off from traditional theories of the passions that focus on the lexical level. In The Semiotics of Passions, the role of the body, the thymic dimension, is highlighted. The body is at the same time part of the world and part of the subject. The Semiotics of Passions remains the clearest and most ambitious articulation of Greimassian semiotics after the turn toward the body.

The stakes are of three varieties: The epistemological stance of The Semiotics of Passions grows out of a fundamental perspective of the world as continuous. The development of the semiotic theory of passions marked a shift away from the study of object-centered states of affairs toward subject-centered states of feelings.

If modalities subtend action, the passions underlie both modalities and actions. While the actantial model described subjects solely in terms of actions, the semiotics of passions characterizes subjects as endowed with an inner dimension. This strangely beautiful image suggests that passions and the values that condition them do not belong to individual actors, but rather to the level of discourse as a whole.

This theory of the passions has triggered controversies. Greimas and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur engaged in a public debate. As preparation to this debate, Greimas had given Ricoeur a text which, in modified form, would later become the Introduction to The Semiotics of Passions. This debate centered on the passions in semiotics. Greimas responded that the semiotics of action only grasps transformations, leaving states of things undetermined.

But in discourse, there are forces that cannot be entirely explained through modalities. Ricoeur takes a different point of view. He says that the passion of which Greimas speaks is the passion of the actant that he himself is, as a theorist. It is, according to Ricoeur, the semiotician who is seized by passion.

Ricoeur speculated that the passions were inside the semiotician himself. Out of this work on The Semiotics of Passions would grow a new paradigm, tensive semiotics, which Fontanille subsequently elaborated, in part through collaboration with Claude Zilberberg. This implication inevitably has consequences for the structuring of content. The analysis remains a semiotic one, strictly speaking, in that Fontanille attends to developing a common method for the whole corpus, across cultures and genres. The functioning of passions in discourse requires us to acknowledge that semiotic existence has a basis in perception.

He argues that signification emerges through a process leading from sensation to perception to interpretation. He discusses four meaning-effects that are constitutive of the configuration of light: He notes that the question of light, notably in analyses of images, has often been reduced to the question of lighting. However, lighting is only one of the dimensions of light, the one that discusses the relationship between a source and a target, controlled by the intensity of the source, relying upon the vector properties of space.

Throughout these four meaning-effects, he identifies three general semantic properties: There, he endeavors to show how the figurative structure of light gives rise to an axiology and a passional universe.

Fontanille endeavors to show that Passion accords a preeminent place to light. He reads the film as a reflection on pictorial and cinematographic aesthetics. Throughout the chapter, Fontanille affirms the importance of enunciative praxis in leading from figuration to refiguration. Tanizaki argues that both types of cultures cohabitate within Japanese culture; he examines the sensibility of everyday life in order to uncover both of these types. Jacques Fontanille co-authored this book with Claude Zilberberg. To their collaboration we owe the development of a tensive semiotics.

This book, Tension et signification , is unique in its form. It evolved into the elaboration of a theoretical position. All of the chapters retain a neat organizational structure somewhat reminiscent of a dictionary. Indeed, even the staccato chapter titles are reminiscent of a dictionary. The two authors began with a list of concepts that they wished to treat, laying out a template for the form and elements of each chapter.

The chapters are devoted, respectively, to the following twelve topics: Each chapter contains the following sections:. In each chapter, the overview section explains which theorists have contributed to the semiotic theory of the concept in question. The definitions section offers two types of definitions: The entire book focuses, as the authors state near the beginning of their foreword, on complexity, tensivity, affectivity, and perception. Fontanille has explained that after he and Zilberberg had drafted the entire manuscript, the publisher asked them to reduce the page count by nearly half.

Out of those pages which had to be cut grew two other works: There are a wide variety of domains invoked here: Fontanille and Zilberberg explain in the foreword that semiotics is finding its way back to its own trans-disciplinary origins.

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The examples invoked here are texts that Fontanille had been reading and studying for a number of years. The book offers a pedagogically useful structure. Following a general introduction to the semiotic study of literature, it contains eight chapters, each organized around a specific theoretical point that is illustrated through analysis of a different literary work.

One of these works by Char is also analyzed in the following two chapters, one on Genre and the other on Style. Fontanille starts with the basics of Greimassian semiotics. He explains that meaning emerges through various levels of signification, from the most abstract to the most concrete: Fontanille suggests that, thanks to its focus on signifying wholes rather than on individual signs, Paris semiotics has been naturally drawn to the analysis of literary texts.

Fontanille is not interested in developing yet another semiotic theory of the literary text, but rather asks what semiotics can bring to each type of question asked: The chapter carefully explains that the blason is a text typical of sixteenth-century court society, in which a poet would praise or criticize. It makes sense to begin with isotopy , because, as Fontanille explains, any reading and interpretation of a text presupposes some internal coherence in the text, which means that it forms a whole, endowed with meaning.

Basically, the isotopic analysis shows the inner workings of a text, the multiple levels upon which a text has meaning, and explains how disparate parts hang together in a coherent whole. He argues that his distinction between the levels of cohesion, coherence, and congruence, coupled with the distinction between the corresponding forms of series, agglomerates, and families, allows us to match a specific strategy with each level of organization.

He considers linguistics and narratology as well as the study of painting. Fontanille starts the chapter with an amusing question: He spends the first few pages explaining that these concepts do not belong just to the realm of psychology but are well and truly semiotic concepts. He echoes his previous work with Greimas in Semiotics of the Passions by distinguishing his task from the traditional, lexical approach to the passions. The lexical approach remains mired in what each individual language and culture demarcates as a separate passion, whereas semiotics strives to arrive at a description of the structures of meaning that goes beyond the specific and the local.

He then moves to the canonical passional schema.

Despite being the work of a woman, it has been a canonical text since the era of its initial publication. While Fontanille, in keeping with a long-entrenched French tradition, tends to focus his various literary analyses exclusively on male authors, it is refreshing here to find an elegant and persuasive analysis of the famous seventeenth-century writer.

Especially given the interest aroused by the semiotic approach to the passions as well as the canonical status of the novel treated here, this chapter would work well as a stand-alone reading assignment in a classroom setting. Fontanille starts this chapter with some historical perspective on the field of rhetoric in France, especially its resurgence during the s under the inspiration of structural semantics, particularly through the work of Groupe Mu. He teases out some of the threads that connect the semiotics of passions to classical rhetoric. The chapter discusses positional actants , then moves on to the canonical rhetorical schema, which consists of three phases: He then moves on to a discussion of rhetoric and figurativity, noting that beneath figures and tropes, one finds sensibility and perception.

Fontanille specifies that discourse is not just the putting into play of a system, but rather a perceptive and sensible field of presence. Fontanille opens the chapter by tracing semiotic interest in intertextuality to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva.

He notes that there is a strong link between intertextuality and enunciation. He describes intertextuality as interaction among discourses, in particular axiological interaction. Turning to his examples, Fontanille reads Char as a reader of the Presocratics especially Heraclitus, Anaximander, and Anaxagoras by way of Heidegger , particularly as concerns the natural world. In this context, the natural world is constituted semiotically around the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water.

Fontanille notes that any semiotics, whether philosophical or semio-linguistic, implies a phenomenological dimension, according to how much of a role they accord to perception and to sensibility He then maps presence onto the two dimensions of apprehension and intent. Anyone seeking a clear, comprehensive overview of narrative semiotics should begin with this book. It could be described as a manual or handbook or even a textbook. It blends a historical perspective with an emphasis on recent research.

The book offers a clear, thorough exposition; numerous examples drawn from sports, cooking, and literature; a balance of introductory overview and detailed analysis; figures that graphically represent the ideas expressed; and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter. The book has gone into a second edition in France; it has appeared in Spanish and English translation; a Brazilian translation is due out in As a textbook of sorts, this book synthesizes the work of several theorists rather than offering one single linear argument. He quickly affirms the centrality of the body and of perception in the signifying process, explaining that there are two planes of language—an interior plane, which belongs to the order of content, and an exterior plane, which belongs to the order of expression—united by the perceiving body that takes position in the world of meaning.

This arrangement gives us interoception the interior plane , exteroception the exterior plane , and proprioception the role of the body.

Here, again, Fontanille affirms that the body participates in both domains, in both planes of language. Schemas of tension combine to form canonical schemas. One prime example of the latter is the prototypical quest schema. Put another way, discourse schematizes experiences and representations, making them meaningful and enabling us to share them with others. Here, Fontanille points out that a certain modal identity can even be what is at stake in a narrative quest— or, in other words, a quest for identity.

The corresponding logics are: They should not be understood as separate entities; rather, they function together, as three points of view on the same faculty of language. This chapter hearkens back to the passional schema that Greimas and Fontanille laid out in The Semiotics of Passions. Fontanille reminds us here of the influence of phenomenology.

The act of enunciation is the motor driving discourse. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of the subject of enunciation. The book is divided into an introduction, three major parts, and a conclusion. Within each of these major parts, the book is divided into a large number of sections and subsections, each only one or two pages in length. Fontanille remarks that the body came to prominence in French semiotic theory in the s with the advent of the theory of the passions.

The task in the wake of this development is to determine the relationship between the semiotic theory of action and the semiotics of passions. Fontanille disagrees with the point of view that the semiotic theory of action was rational and well-formed, while the semiotics of passions was all about ruptures and dysfunction. If this were the case, then the semiotics of action would suffice. Fontanille argues, on the contrary, that it is the semiotics of passions that gives access to the more general model.

From this point of view, the semiotics of action is just one particular perspective within the broader theory of passions. Thus we are called to completely rethink the organization of semiotic theory, and in particular to rethink the place of the body in semiosis. The body is truly at the center of semiosis, because the body is indispensable to the operation that unites the two planes of language.

Fontanille acknowledges that there is a recurrent ambivalence surrounding the semiotic approach to the body. On the one hand, the body functions as substratum of semiosis, and on the other hand, the body functions as a semiotic figure. Fontanille cautions us not to adopt a simplistic dichotomy of underlying structure versus surface form, but rather to remember that these two dimensions are tightly interconnected. It looks at the effects of this body on semiosis and on the instances of discourse that take it up, as well as on the theory of the act and of action, of which it is the operator.

Fontanille focuses here on the phenomenon of lapsus, or lapse. In other words, this is a semiotics that recovers the meaning of lapses and errors. The chapter starts with a question: Fontanille asserts that lapses escape discursive programming.

Fontanille, Jacques

Despite being unpredictable, lapses still arise from preconditions of signification susceptible to being described. Thus, Fontanille concludes, we can use the same interpretive tools to describe lapses as we use to describe other facets of the production of discourse. The lapse is particularly interesting because it offers us ways to reexamine the theory of the instance of enunciation. In a classical Greimassian move, Fontanille affirms the limits of traditional approaches to the phenomenon in question here, the lapse in order to set up his own analysis.

Fontanille notes that Godard is known for his cinematic meta-reflections on pictorial aesthetics and cinematography. This lapse , which occurs in a scene in which fellow-workers are gathered in the home of Isabelle, the factory worker threatened with being fired, often, according to Fontanille, causes laughter on the part of the spectators. Sound and image do not correlate. At times they even contradict one another. Basically, Fontanille is interested here in all sorts of configurations that fall outside of canonical discourse, ranging from the lapse or slip to mumbling or even to delirium.

Fontanille classes the lapse as one of several types of corporeal accidents. These accidents, according to him, reveal another form of life, another semiotic universe and another system of values.

Fontanille establishes a typology of the sensible body, based upon the contrast between the body proper Soi, Corps propre and the flesh Moi, Chair. He shows that it is no longer simply a question of integrating the body into semiotic theory, but rather of asking how bodies themselves can function as signs, how they can become figures, texts, images, objects of meaning.

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