Uma semioticista: entre a teoria e a paixão

Abstract

The Dictionary of Semiotics (Greimas; Courtés, 2008, p. 324), after defining the natural world as a “discursive” structure that presents itself in the frame of the subject/object relation, adds that this world “is the utterance built by man and decipherable by him [man himself]”. There is a Brazilian semiotician who takes readers of her work to a peculiar unveiling of what “is there”, made semiosis. We want to pay a tribute to this intellectual, whose work has cleared unimaginable fields in order to help our perception, and whose own conduct has led us to want to go “beyond the limits”. We are talking about Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros. The desire to pay reverence to the thinker and to acknowledge her moral strength in our lives will always be greater than the power of our words. However, moved by the memory of the brilliance that comes from there, or from the place of Diana herself, we shall try to talk about some of the principles that underlie her work, such as attention to figurativity, and ideology conceived as not being separate from the tensions of affection. In the meantime, we try to come into conjunction with the object of value which she offers to those who approach her: the will to live articulated by an ‘extended will”. It is a wish that, far from retreating when confronted by some impossibility, feeds on its own non-power, as envisaged by Greimas and Fontanille (1993) in a study on obstinacy.