The Semiotics of Passion

In the last ten years several disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology, have selected emotions or passions as their object of analysis. In what might be construed as a reaction to the abstractions (or disconnectedness) of theory, certain practitioners have now decided to explore whether various productions of the body can be folded into the space of epistemology. In "The Semiotics of Passion", Greimas and Fontanille explore the possibility that so-called subjective states - affect, feeling, emotion, passion, avarice, honour, and jealousy - and their multiple mediations can have a semiotic existence. The authors examine such questions as: What are the conditions for the existence of passion? Can passion be submitted to a logic of language? Does passion allow systemic semiotic transformations? Starting from the premise that a meaningful world involves the "subject" in the "state of affairs", Greimas's and Fontanille's investigation of the complex "psychic states" of speaking subjects takes them through texts in philosophy and literature from the 17th to the 20th century.
Exploring the work of Descartes, Spinoza, Shakespeare, and Proust, among others, "The Semiotics of Passion" will advance and refine semiotics in general and literary semiotics in particular. A.J. Greimas (1917-1992) was professor of general semantics at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His theoretical work on structures of discourse has been seminal for many semioticians. He was the author of many books in French and Lithuanian. Jacques Fontanille is professor of linguistics and semiotics at the University of Limoges and co-director of the seminar in general semantics at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.