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Cet article vise a montrer, avec les instruments de l’analyse semiotique, que Slow Food est une marque parfaite. D’un cote, cette marque nait par opposition a une autre marque tres forte, le colosse mondial du fast food McDonald’s. De l’autre, cette opposition n’est pas, a l’origine, une offre de produits alternatifs a McDonald’s, de marchandises concurrentes a destination des consommateurs, mais une proposition de nouvelles valeurs : une formulation abstraite d’une forme de vie alternative a celle de la fast life. C’est uniquement dans un second temps, une fois la marque constituee (grâce a ses supports communicatifs), qu’elle se dote d’une serie d’offres commerciales : nourriture, vins, lieux de restauration, edition, entreprises, des territoires entiers, voire des villes en regime slow. Ainsi, par un geste semiotique absolu, Slow Food accomplit le proces discursif typique de toute marque et devient, comme l’aurait dit Levi-Strauss, du « bon a penser ».

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was born in St. Petersburg on April 17, 1895 and died in Leningrad on August 22, 1970. Despite remaining in the same city, the events of history caused those places, over the course of (his) time, to take on a whole new meaning and a very different flavor. Of course, to a folklorist like Propp, used to reflecting on the distance of millennia, those seventy-five years will have been nothing. Though the fact remains that the monumental epochal shifts he witnessed (the Russian Revolution and the long cultural and political Soviet regime that followed) feature heavily in his brilliant work.

Considering as a starting point Greimas’s last work (De l’imperfection), taken into very little consideration by later semiotic research, I would like to see whether it would be possible to make, in the field of taste, the distinction that Greimas did in the visual field: between a “figurative” taste (that I should call tasty) and a “plastic” taste (that I should call flavorful). Much has been discussed about the synesthetic nature of gustatory sensoriality. But very little has been said about links and differences between an intellectualistic taste perception (i. e., recognition of figures of food through semantic grids) and a taste perception of a pure aesthetic nature, supported by the former and producing further significations that cannot be reproduced through language words. How does an aesthetic grasp of taste work, if it works at all? In order to answer this question I will briefly analyze different kinds of texts.

Multinaturalism shouldn’t be viewed solely as the paradigmatic existence of multiple natures in different cultures – or “ontologies” as Descola refers to them – but also and most importantly as the syntagmatic presence, and the resulting contrast, of various ontologies within the same culture. From a semiotic point of view, then, the so-called ontologies are considered to be effects of meaning derived from precise discursive dispositifs. Describing such dispositifs is the aim of this paper.

This volume has at least three directions of discourse. The first is a dialogue between semiotics and other disciplines dealing in animal studies: philosophy, the philosophy of language and mind, the human and social sciences, the cognitive sciences and the neurosciences. The second is a discussion within semiotics, in the passage from zoosemiotics 1.0 to zoosemiotics 2.0. Last but not least is the cultivation of an empirical field of research, or rather a critical exploration of social culture in search of interesting phenomena or, rather, phenomena pertinent to our in-depth theoretical and epistemological study.

Cultures develop the criteria to construct and recognize their texts, and pose them as normal, usual, ‘natural’. For us a book is a text, in Middle Ages for everyone a city was a text. But when it is necessary to critically inspect such a culture by analyzing its texts, it becomes necessary to understand their conditions of possibility and their functioning. So, from the semiotic point of view the text is something that needs to be recognized and constructed at the same time, that is to say invented according to the double meaning this word has for the ancient rhetoric (recovering) and for modern science (creating) (Marrone 2014). This is true for the semiotician who search for the fundamentals of any possible social and cultural meaning but, before that, for any subject, individual or collective, looking after his own identity. On one side the text is the starting point of any semiotic investigation, a model produced to examine and interpret a given cultural reality, on the other such a cultural reality exist because it is textually formed. This is very briefly the thesis that I will try to demonstrate in this paper, from which it descends a new role for the semiotic analysis of text: that of a new way of criticizing culture.

Post-Greimassian semiotics has worked toward a return to phenomenology, with the aim of studying the sensorial dimension and the body. Most of this research, however, has all but forgotten Greimas’s last book, De imperfection (1987), in which he proposes an original version of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy with the notion of the aesthetic grasp. I propose to reconsider this almost abandoned notion, both from a theoretical point of view (a new version of the catharsis of philosophical aesthetics) and from the vantage of textual descriptions (the short story “The Naked Bosom” by Italo Calvino and the movie Ratatouille).

Objeto de estudo das mais diversas disciplinas, a polí­tica é também um campo fértil de investigação para a sociossemiótica. Se a polí­tica é um sistema de significação, é preciso tratá-la como tal, propondo sugestões metodológicas capazes de articular no mesmo esquema explicativo suas dimensões sensí­vel-expressiva (a prática polí­tica) e inteligí­vel-conteúdistica (os valores polí­ticos). Este ensaio procura mostrar como, a partir da própria renovação do seu aparato teórico, a sociossemiótica pode agora contribuir com modelos de explicação dos fenômenos sociopolí­ticos que, assumindo a existência de dois regimes semióticos distintos — um do sentido e outro da significação —, integram essas duas dimensões da experiência humana. Palavras chave polí­tica, Sociossemiótica, regimes de sentido. Abstract Politics is not only an object thati is studied by different disciplines but also fertile field of investigation for Sociossemiotics. If Politics is a system of signification it is important to deal with it as such proposing methodological sugestions that should be able to link its sensitive-expressive dimensions (the politic practice) and comphreensive dimensions (the political values). This essay tries to show through the renewal of its theoretical instruments, how Sociossemiotics can now contribute with explanations models of sociopolitics phenomena which take part in the two dimensions of human experience and the two semiotic regime - one of the sense and the other of the signification. Key words politics, Sociossemiotics, regime of sense.

À partir d’un projet de recherche sur la gestualité (presque abandonné ensuite par la sémiotique structurale), Greimas avait élaboré dans Du sens la notion de « monde naturel », en parallèle à celle de « langue naturelle ». La relation entre mots et choses n’est pas référentielle (de représentation) mais intersémiotique (de traduction). Cette idée pose les bases théoriques d’une sémiotique où le sens est vu comme possibilité virtuelle de transcodage et la signification comme réalisation concrète de ce même transcodage. Relire les pages greimassiennes dédiées à ces questions permet aussi d’interroger certaines hypothèses actuelles de naturalisation du sens et du corps., Within the context of a research program concerning gesture (almost abandoned by structural semiotics in the following years), in Du sens Greimas has elaborated the concept of “natural world”, in parallel to the linguistic concept of “ natural language ”. The relationship between words and things is not one referential (representation of the world by the language), but, rather, inter-semiotic (translation of world into language, and vice versa). Such idea lays down the theoretic basis of a semiotic according to which sense is intended as virtual possibility of transcodification, and signification as concrete realization of such transcodification. Reading Greimas’ pages dedicated to such matters raises certain doubts in respect of all the hypothesis of naturalization of sense and body.

International audience

Marrone Gianfranco. La sémiologie en Italie, recherches récentes. In: Littérature, n°88, 1992. Formes et mouvement - Proust éditions et lectures. pp. 103-106.

The aim of this article is to discuss the relationship between experiences with drugs and musical/visual experiences using a socio-semiotic theoretical framework. In recent collective research still underway, this topic is already being explored in many directions: first, by showing how sensorial alterations caused by drugs are 'translated' into different texts of pop culture, such as songs, video clips, movies, etc.; second, by reconstructing the themes and motivations of many subcultures (hippie, psychedelic, punk) that originated on the basis of an alteration of the senses achieved through the simultaneous use of music and drugs; finally, by proposing some formal similarities - and possible shfts - between music and drug experiences. In particular, I propose a comparative analysis of four texts that describe different processes of alteration by referring to different drugs: synthetics in A Clockwork Orange by Burgess and Kubrick; hashish in Uccelli da gabbia e da voliera by De Carlo; cocaine in Bright Lights, Big City by Mc-Inerney; and alcohol in Tratado sobre la resaca by Bas. What matters in this comparison is that although they talk about different substances, all of these texts end up proposing, each one in a different way, types of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations between substances that transcend the substantialistic and traditionalistic distinction between these drugs.

ll XXXV congresso dell' AISS (Associazione Italiana di Studi Semiotici) dal titolo “Destini del sacro. Discorso religioso e semiotica delle culture”, è organizzato in collaborazione con la Facoltà di Scienze della Comunicazione dell’Università di Reggio Emilia. I differenti studiosi, molti di fama internazionale, si sono riuniti intorno ad un tema, quello del “sacro”, che in semiotica non è riconducibile immediatamente ad un’area di indagine dai contorni netti o a specifiche tecniche di analisi. Definire questa area, confrontare le diverse prospettive teoriche e le indagini testuali, è stato uno degli obiettivi del convegno. Cosa permette di definire “sacro” un testo? Quali sono le valenze semantiche che il termine “sacro” assume nelle diverse culture? È possibile pensare la sacralità come effetto di senso?

Fonds audiovisuel du programme "ESCoM-AAR" (Equipe Sémiotique Cognitive et nouveaux Médias - Archives Audiovisuelles de la Recherche. Paris, France, 2000 - 2016).; Attraverso una ricca ricognizione sul sacro e le sue rappresentazioni, Umberto Eco ci parla della semiotica e dei processi conoscitivi e interpretativi.

L’argomento che Calabrese presenta è la terza tappa di un lavoro più complesso sull’iconografia analitica. Il termine, ideato da Daniel Arasse, porta in sé una visione distante dall’iconografia tradizionale, infatti crea un connubio molto più stretto con l'antropologia e con la semiotica per analizzare ed approfondita in maniera completa le figure e i loro significati. Distanziandosi dalla visione tradizionale, secondo la quale gli elementi dell’espressione sono la base per arrivare a comprendere il contenuto, ovvero che si debba partire dai formanti plastici per giungere a quelli figurativi, Calabrese effettua un processo inverso: dai formanti figurativi ai plastici, dalla categorie di contenuto a quelle dell’espressione.

Il XXXV Convegno dell'Aiss (Associazione Italiana degli Studi Semiotici), organizzato in collaborazione con la Facoltà di Scienze dela Comunicazione di Reggio Emilia, è l'occasione per discutere sul tema: 'Destini del sacro. Discorso religioso e semiotica delle culture' . La conferenza “Papi, Madonne e rockstar: dal sacro al profano e ritorno” si apre con le immagini proiettate in sala del Concerto Eucaristico di Bologna del 27 settembre 1997, in quanto tentativo, certamente riuscito, di fare della musica rock uno strumento per evangelizzare il mondo dei giovani. Introduce il tema di discussione l’esperta di studi semiotici Patrizia Violi la quale, citando i giudizi delle autorità ecclesiastiche in merito alla musica rock e pop, individua l’elemento di forza dell’evento nella relazione che si crea tra sacro e profano. Nel concerto viene infatti riaffermato il sacro attraverso una fortissima azione di profanizzazione. Si ha così un doppio movimento: dal sacro al profano e dal profano al sacro: il corpo del Papa ne è il principale vettore. Anche l'organizzazione degli spazi è funzionale a tale integrazione. Da allora in poi Giovanni Paolo II diventerà infatti un'icona del pop universale, un'icona mediatica e televisiva. Emblematiche a questo proposito sono anche le immagini dell’incontro tra Bono e Giovanni Paolo II, in cui il Papa indossa gli occhiali da sole di Bono. In riferimento al Confession Tour di Madonna prende la parola la prof.ssa Cosenza, la quale sottolinea il rischio insito nella contaminazione dei due universi opposti. Sono mostrate alcune performance altamente provocatorie di una tappa del tour, che hanno portato il Vaticano a scomunicare Madonna. Sono prese in considerazione alcune delle critiche innalzate e la replica della popstar: dai due punti di vista estremi si evince l'ambivalenza semantica di un medesimo messaggio. La fase finale della performance di Madonna vede l’utilizzo del messaggio COEXIST, un’esortazione all'unione tra popoli, già proclamato anche da Bono, leader U2.