Ways and Voices of the Affect

Abstract

The article analyses the different treatments of affect in the field of semiotic researches opened by Greimas. It highlights the premises, their developments, their disappearances and their resurgences, and more generally the complementarities and solidary derivations. In Sémantique Structurale, Greimas already posed some milestones with the thymic category and proprioceptivity. Much later, the theory of passions will encounter tensiveness, and Claude Zilberberg will even make affect the point of origin of all tensiveness. Then arrives the contribution of Eric Landowski, who, under the heading of “feeling” (l’éprouver), renders obsolete the distinction between lexicalized passions (nameable) and “passions without names”. The proposals of Jacques Geninasca, Herman Parret and more recently Waldir Beividas will also be evoked. But above all we shall insist on the path developed by Greimas himself in De l’Imperfection, starting from the aesthetic experience in existence itself.