Semiotics of Passions

Abstract

Arousing sadness or provoking happiness, causing problems or avoiding them, boosting the human will or hindering it, passions engage philosophers, scientists of ethics, and men of letters. The history of semiotics reveals that specialists in the field have been concerned with the role of sensation in achieving narrative programs, transforming from one situation to another and consolidating man's interaction, active or passive, with his milieu. Passion is a key element of action or recalling its details (players are encouraged to win their match or regretted their loss). Passion provides one with the necessary energy to meet expectations (Passion relates to what is going to happen) or he undergoes an ethical evaluation to identify his weaknesses (Passion relates to what took place). Also, in all emotional situations, the body plays a significant role in forming the meaning (The body senses and perceives what surrounds it) and in embodying what is painful or delightful for it. In their co-authored book, The Semiotics of Passions: From States of Affairs to States of Feeling, A. J. Greimas and J. Fontanille are concerned with formulating a semiotic enterprise of passion or sensation that is independent (Theirs enterprise encompasses a number of notions that indicate the independence of emotional dimensions of a discourse and compose a standard grammar of passions). Formulated by the Semiotic Linguistic Group, widely known as the Parisian School, over years, theory of passion is to be reviewed in terms of three domains, epistemology, theory, and application.