The beauty of gesture: (mis)matches between the ethics of art and the aesthetics of life

Abstract

This paper aims to reflect on the possible relations between ethics and aesthetics both in the field of art and of the existence of subjects, through a semiotic investigation that follows the theoretical paths followed by Greimas in his De l’imperfection (1987), in order to better understand the structure of the aesthetic event, as well as its relations with the ethics of existence. Therefore it will be necessary to return to some fundamental authors on whom Greimas has based his arguments, among them Jean Galard, author of La beauté du geste (1986), text that inspired Greimas to write his paper “Le beau geste” (2014), which develops, as we intend to demonstrate, the structural foundations for the phenomenon of happening, outlined in De l’imperfection (1987), the book that established an epistemological turning point in Greimasian thought and in semiotics theory in general. Furthermore, authors of linguistics and literary theory will be explored in this paper, in particular those who have reflected on issues such as ethics and aesthetics, such as Paul Valéry, Roman Jakobson, Joseph Brodsky, among others.