Jacques Fontanille Has The Floor

Abstract

Conducted in writing between July 10 and November 4, 2025, this eleven-question interview aims to reconstruct, through Jacques Fontanille’s situated testimony, the emergence and consolidation of the semiotics of practices by examining the intellectual, institutional, and epistemological conditions of this process. Fontanille traces the expansion of semiotics from textuality toward situations, experience, and embodiment, while emphasizing the collective role played by researchers, seminars, and research centers in this development. The interview also clarifies the reformulation of the model from the generative trajectory of expression to levels of pertinence and, subsequently, to regimes of semiosis, as well as the semio-anthropological turn in his recent work. By distinguishing the actor’s memory, the available documentation, and the author’s interpretation, the article provides both a source for the recent history of the discipline and a point of departure for examining its contemporary developments, particularly in Brazilian research on digital, political, and social objects.