From action to passion: the semiotic journey towards meaning

Abstract

French semiotics emerged in the 1960s with Greimas’ researches, and it aimed developing a study of signification by adopting a structuralist methodology which, initially, excluded from its analysis all the elements related to discourse subjectivity. This paper aims to reflect about the advances of semiotics, from its beginning, involving passion studies, to the manner which the reflections on tensivity and phenomenology, along with Greimas’ modality and passion studies, little by little expanded the grip of the theory in question, gradually replacing a semiotics that had action as the center of its concerns by another one, the semiotics of passions.