Le papillon tête-de-Janus A propos de Sémantique structurale

Year 2014, Issue: 32, 0 - 0, 25.12.2018

Eric Landowskı

Abstract

Over time, Structural Semantics has become a kind of monument, a “classic”
that is often merely welcomed from afar. Is it still necessary to read this text which
takes us back fifty years? Yes, because the potentialities as well as the problems
of the present semiotics are essentially related to the options around which this
founding work is articulated: The adoption of a generative perspective, a lasting
alteration of the problem of meaning on a theory of narrativity, but also an essential place attributed to perception as the basis of the comprehension of meaning.
The subsequent developments and extensions, made either by Greimas, his collaborators or his successors, show a relatively coherent development process in
which the new positions, far from invalidating the original project, have, on the
contrary, made it possible to enrich it.
The “reflections on the actantial models”, the subject of the last chapters of the
book, succeed ten years later in a narrative grammar that presents itself universal
in scope. The strategic choice made in favour of this approach had to result in the
provisional storage of another problem, which was also contemplated from the
outset. For the interrogation of the first pages of Structural Semantics talks about
the “situation of man” attacked “from the prenatal age to death” by meanings
that “appeal to him from everywhere”. In fact, Greimas reminds us ten years later
in his Dictionnaire, “the natural world is a figurative language whose figures are
made of” sensible qualities “[which] act directly - without linguistic mediation -
on man”. Hence the possibility of conceiving a semiotics “of experience”: from
the experience of a meaning, not deciphered from the surface of texts but experienced from our relations with “the things themselves”. Thus, in parallel with the
construction of the “semio-narrative”, Greimas did not cease at any moment to
encourage the work on semiotics directly related to the perception of the sensitive
world (visual semiotics, semiotics of space, semiotics of gesture), and more generally to call for the constitution of a semiotics “of the natural world”. There are
therefore good reasons to read, or to re-read his Structural semantics.

Keywords

Structural semantics, A.J. Greimas, semiotics, perception, meaning, actantial models, semio-narrative, visual semiotics, semiotics of space, semiotics of gesture, aesthesia

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