New conversations with Jacques Fontanille

Abstract

This interview, carried out from February to May 2014, deals with the most recent developments of Jacques Fontanille’s work, French semiotician and one of the most prominent figures in European semiotics. In this testimony, the theorist revisits the semiotics of practices and the notion of forms of life, theme of his latest book, still unpublished. Throughout these conversations, which are a continuation of an interview performed in 2006 (PORTELA, 2006), Fontanille discusses the current state of semiotics in France, the relationship between semiotics and the human sciences and the role of the intellectual in society. For J. Fontanille, semiotics should seek to address crosscutting theoretical issues and respond to questions that are on the agenda in society, not focusing only on the aporias and on questions intrinsic to the semiotic currents as institutional groups. Thus, the biggest challenge for semiotics nowadays is to find new alternatives to reinvent itself as a discipline of predictive and strategic vocation.