Pierluigi Basso Fossali

La passion et la figurativité: les deux tentations greimassiennes face à la profondeur

Abstract Greimas’s intellectual trajectory can be seen as an intellectual journey full of challenges that left behind living remnants of a courage and an “energetism” of thinking which prohibits, even today, the construction of a dogmatism based solely on a single synchronic image of his semiotics. We can identify Greimas with his beloved topic, “the Fearless hero”: on the one hand, he extended the quest of a Sender, in keeping with the expectations of a deep narrative schema, while on the other hand, he structured his life around the permanence of a passion. Should we attribute this search to a “meta-will,” or to an endless implication in figurativity? “With passion, figurativity reigns,” Ricoeur told his friend Greimas, who worked on the origins of the modalities, with the predicament of raising the issue of an unanalysable ontic horizon. How can we explain the apparent contradiction between, on the one hand, the Greimassian challenge to deal with being, even speculatively, and, on the other, the search for an endless passion anchored in perception and its re-elaboration? Against the certainty of deep narrative logic is opposed the surface where forms of life coexist, where we find “the fidgeting, the uncertainty we are in.”

From paradigm to environment: The foreign rhythm and punctual catalysis of culture

Lotman and Barthes created two different critically oriented semiotic traditions. Both of them wen t through an evolution in their thought, moving from systematic organization to living transformations in cultural systems. This allowed them to carry out a bilateral critique of codes and identities in favour of either anonymous hybridity (Lotman) or neutrality (Barthes), where heterogeneity becomes a principle of creative “disorder”. Though quite different as regards their theoretical production, both scholars meet in their refusal to turn descriptive practices (studium) into a model of any other form of behaviour, considering that the determination of textual or institutional perimetres is not always clear. In short, Barthes and Lotman anticipated current research trends on the semiotics of practices; Barthes because of a sort of self-reflexion on the behaviour of the interpreter in front of an object, and Lotman through his analytic interest in attitudes and ways of living. Barthes’s view on writing essentially reaches Lotman’s conception of culture as a “collective person”: we are looking for traces of breathing in the life of signs. More precisely, we can assert that, in the view of both scholars, inscribing speech events in history problematizes the dynamic and asynchronous relation between the structural frame of a culture and its textual heritage. The rhythm of fashion is not a side topic in their research, but, rather, it is the clearest exemplification of a dialectic between structural projection from the outside and local introjection of forms, depending on the conditions that make a difference.

Réflexivité critique et modélisation : Enquêtes sémiotiques sur les rôles du métalangage dans l’activité théorique en sciences humaines

Notre contribution cherche a problematiser le role du metalangage a travers des enquetes en succession qui visent a preciser sa fonction dans l’economie interne des theories, ses tensions avec la pratique d’analyse, son heritage en tant que patrimoine conceptuel, sa capacite d’accrediter des positions theoriques sur la scene publique. En particulier, nous avons focalise notre attention sur les relations que le metalangage, en tant qu’organisation interne de la theorie, entretient avec l’activite de modelisation des objets de recherche. La these finale est que le metalangage doit cultiver sa distance critique par rapport aux modelisations et renoncer donc a toute pretention englobante et homogeneisatrice. Selon une telle perspective, le metalangage denonce une systematisation interne de la theorie afin de dynamiser les relations avec les terrains de recherche et de favoriser une elaboration conceptuelle qui cherche a articuler deux fronts d’organisation (le regard theorique et les objets d’analyse) qui doivent preserver leur distinction et leur autonomie.