On the Role of Instances.

Abstract

The examination of the history of French semiotics leads us to consider the change of paradigm that took place in the seventies as something decisive. Dominated by a formal structuralism, the studies on “meaning” did not take into account much until then the sentient universe and only retained as pertinent the conceptual universe as well as the principle of immanence.

Likewise, the lesson retained and later developed by enunciation linguistics (Benveniste) by phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and by psychoanalysis (Freud and later Lacan) is that if we want to agree on “meaning,” it is necessary to take into account “the force of things,” the principle of reality (M. Arrivé). Contrary to standard semiotics of the sixties, the semiotics of instances strives to integrate being in its reflection. The metalanguage, inseparable from all analysis, should not hide this initial fact, upon knowing that language in itself is inseparable from being and, for this reason, from the body. Benveniste, Merleau-Ponty and Freud agree on this point.

The article bases itself on three of Freud’s texts (1891, 1905, 1919). They bring out the emergence of the producing instances of “meaning”, that are subordinated or not to the “force” (power of the third immanent or transcendent actant: the non subject, the almost subject and the subject. It is starting the game of these fundamental instances that the semiotics of instances is composed.