Enunciation

The chapter is entirely dedicated to enunciation, a central notion in semiotic theory that has been the subject of constant reasoning and theoretical investigation by Bruno Latour with a series of repercussions that are also significant for contemporary semiotic research. From the initial recourse to Greimasian notions of débrayage and embrayage employed to account for the ways in which in a text authenticity manifests itself as a meaning effect, to the increasing attention paid to objects, to the material manifestation that the construction of scientific facts takes on, enunciation proves to be an essential concept for deepening the complex relationship between semiotics and Latour’s work. The paragraphs thus reconstruct Latour’s effort to extend the scope of enunciation outside the sphere of textuality, openly criticizing semiotics, considered too anchored to the study of language. A criticism that nevertheless fails to recognize a significant turning point in contemporary semiotic research that has long since broadened the perimeter of the phenomena of signification analyzed, with the progressive development of the sociosemiotic perspective. Particular attention is paid to an essay often overlooked in the literature on Latourian work, namely Petite philosophie de l’énonciation and to the semiotics implicit in some of the French intellectual’s most famous works seemingly distant from semiotic theory, including An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. An Anthropology of the Moderns.