Critique and Clinic of the Sign: Deleuze, Guattari, and Semiotics

Since Paolo Fabbri’s insightful contributions (1998, 2015), the relationship between Deleuze’s thought and semiotics has been revisited multiple times, though often reduced to a mere “magical citation” or a fashionable reference. With this issue, we aim to foster a renewed examination of this encounter, both at a theoretical and foundational level and in terms of its productive potential.

Before his collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze’s engagement with the langue of French structuralism appears partial, already marked by a critical reworking. The seminal and well-known essay Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? (1968) sketches an autonomous trajectory, even as it remains rooted in the linguistic and structuralist core – drawing upon Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and Althusser – as well as, to some extent, semiotics. Beyond the explicit reference in Proust et les signes, it is especially in Différence et répétition and, more ambivalently, in Logique du sens that a path takes shape, intertwining elements of logical thought and its paradoxes with figures such as “Saussure–Jakobson–Benveniste –Guillaume–Culioli,” in a heterogeneous assemblage.

The study of this relationship, which became a true corps à corps after his encounter with Guattari (along with the added influence of Hjelmslev), remains partially an underexplored area, deserving of further investigation. From the theory of signs in Proust and Spinoza (where already an original critique of the arbitrariness of the sign emerges) to the deconstruction of structuralist linguistics in Mille Plateaux (through the critique of generativity, double articulation, and a unique interpretation of Hjelmslev’s stratification theory), the relationship between Deleuze, Guattari, and semiotics calls for deeper inquiry.

The Deleuzian texts of the 1950s and 1960s do not simply embrace structuralist theories of the sign but rather problematize them from within. Deleuze’s analysis of the sign introduces concerns that exceed semiotics as an academic discipline: the unconscious as language (with its metaphorical and metonymic mechanisms), the symptomatic dimension of the body, and the nature of writing itself. Semiotics, then, is not conceived as an institutionalized knowledge or a closed field but rather as a broader process of sense production (tout court), as evidenced by Deleuze’s writings on cinema in the early 1980s.

Similarly, one could argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of structuralist linguistics does not necessarily entail the dissolution of a “theory of signs” but, rather, opens up new directions for semiotics itself. Could this critique constitute an opportunity for a new genealogy of semiotics, one that moves beyond its original fusion with linguistics and its philosophical-anthropological matrix, rooted in the identification of language with verbal communication? Contemporary semiotics, particularly in its Greimasian and post-Greimasian evolution, seems to have already pursued this trajectory—perhaps, at least in part, due to Deleuze’s influence.

Another crucial area of investigation is Deleuze’s engagement with one of the founding figures of semiotics, Peirce. Deleuze cites Peirce primarily in his books on cinema, albeit through the mediation of Gérard Deledalle’s anthological studies. However, this engagement remains fragmentary, failing to produce a full-fledged hermeneutic operation, resulting in a reading that is more a misinterpretation than a heuristic epistemic reappropriation. This call for papers, therefore, seeks to explore this ambiguity, reactivating Peircean semiotic tools in relation to Deleuzian thought.

The relationship between Deleuze (and Deleuze-Guattari) and semiotics – like any other disciplinary interaction in their thought – is not structured in terms of a history of ideas or a philological reconstruction but rather at an epistemological level, within the tensions animating certain key concepts (or “planes”) of their philosophical construction. In their work, semiotics plays a crucial role precisely where it does not appear as an explicit reference but rather as a vector of force within an unprecedented conceptual operation.

Perhaps this is the “theory of signs and the event” that Fabbri (1998) alluded to: a movement traversing Stoicism and Alice in Wonderland, Spinoza and Nietzsche, machinic unconscious, the analysis of bodies, dispositifs, becomings, symptoms… and a life.

Within Deleuze’s work, one can thus identify both an explicit semiotics and an implicit semiotics, which does not emerge through scholastic citations but through the very modalities of thought formation, language use, and writing. This latter aspect is perhaps inextricably linked to an anti-semiotics, particularly evident in the texts of the 1970s and 1980s. The prefix “anti-” does not indicate a radical rejection nor resolve into a dialectical synthesis; rather, it acts as an antidote against any crystallization of semiosis. Instead of a formal machine (structuralist linguistics) representing sense, Deleuze and Guattari propose a dynamic that inextricably binds sense and nonsense together. Their approach thus constitutes a semiotics of intensities, operating simultaneously within sense and its dissolution.

Thanks in part to Guattari, Deleuze’s semiotic reflection is primarily articulated as a critique of the traditional notion of the sign, conceived as something that “stands for something else.” From his early writings on Spinoza—where he explores Spinoza’s notion of equivocal knowledge through signs—to his radical reading of Hjelmslev as a Spinozist thinker (in Mille Plateaux, emphasizing the expressive dimension), this critique continuously evolves. Even in Deleuze’s engagement with Peirce, one detects an interest in Peirce’s classification of signs, interpreted almost as a “periodic table of elements.”

We propose that the guiding vector of this inquiry could be located in Deleuze’s concept of the symptom, and in the ancient etymology of semiotics as semeiotica: a concatenation of signs and bodies. The symptom constitutes a form of sign that is “non-objective,” nor reducible to a conscious interpretation or clinical representation. To read Deleuze’s theoretical gesture as a symptomatic operation necessarily entails engaging with semiotics.

The sign as symptom implicates language, communication, but also the unconscious, the body, and the practices that govern and manage it – style (critique) and illness (clinic), the human (linguistic sign) and the animal, biology and life (a-subjective symptom). Yet, for Deleuze (and, once again, for Guattari), the symptomatic dimension does not – starting from Proust et les signes -amount to a quest for a given or yet-to-be-discovered truth, nor to a form of cure (as evidenced by their radical critique of psychoanalysis). Rather, as Critique et clinique makes clear, the symptom appears as a process of transformation, of passage, of construction, and of opening towards new worlds and perspectives – including intersections with von Uexküll’s zoosemiotics, as well as contemporary biosemiotics and ecological semiotics.

Regarding the intertwining of symptom and sign, we seek to launch an interdisciplinary challenge that extends beyond semioticians and philosophers. We envision this issue as comprising two sections: one dedicated to the theoretical reconstruction of the relationship between Deleuze-Guattari and semiotics, and another focused on conceptual production, testing the capacity of the aforementioned theoretical frameworks to engage with contemporary phenomena deeply embedded in semiotic processes, such as artificial intelligence, the digital and media landscape, contemporary discursive formations, and the entanglements between signs and bodies, humanity and animality.

Below, we propose a non-exhaustive list of thematic axes centered on the notion of the symptom:

The sign, the critique of the sign, and the symptom; semiotics and semeiotica

• The symptom as singularity: language, style, and writing
• Beyond linguistics: minor literatures and new languages
• The psychoanalytic/psychiatric symptom: the critique of the unconscious as language, the machinic unconscious, the family novel, and schizoanalysis

Signs, symptoms, and bodies

• The semiotics of Alice in Wonderland and ancient semiotics: new origins for semiotics?
• The relationship between signs and bodies, including intersections with other post-structuralist or post-humanist theories
• Symptom, pathology, and pathos: dialogues with Spinoza, Nietzsche, Barthes, and Blanchot

Human, animal, and “vital” signs

• Possible dialogues between zoosemiotics, biosemiotics, and Deleuze-Guattari’s thought

Signs, signifying chains, and assemblages

• Semiotics, linguistics, and structuralism: from Proust et les signes to Mille Plateaux
• Guattari’s role in shaping the relationship between Deleuze and semiotics
• Theory of enunciation and theories of subjectivity or consciousness

Signs and symptoms through the cinematic lens

Suggested Bibliography

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Campbell, I. (2019). “Deleuze and Guattari’s Semiorhythmology: A Sketch for a Rhythmic Theory of Signs”. La Deleuziana 10, 351-370.

Cantone, D. (2024). “Evitare il significante. Gilles Deleuze e il linguaggio dei segni”. Scenari, 20.

Cardoso Jr., H. (2024). “Deleuze’s zeroness and Peirce’s pure zero regarding the expansion of semiotics’ categorial frame”. Semiotica, 2024(258), 1-23.

Cavalcante D. F. M. (2023). “Por uma semiótica gaguejante em Deleuze & Guattari: possíveis veredas para pensar uma comunicação intensiva”, Intercom – Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos Interdisciplinares da Comunicação, 46º Congresso Brasileiro de Ciências da Comunicação – PUC-Minas – 4 a 8/9/2023 https://sistemas.intercom.org.br/pdf/link_aceite/nacional/11/0816202321381864dd6bfab159e.pdf 

Dondero, M. G. (2023). “The Experimental Space of the Diagram According to Peirce, Deleuze and Goodman”. Semiotic Review, 9: Images. https://semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/79 

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Dymek, A. (2015). Cinéma et Sémiotique. Deleuze en question. Bordeaux: Le Bord de l’Eau.

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Fabbri, P. (2015). “Diagrammi in filosofia: G. Deleuze e la semiotica ‘pura’”. E/C 2015 (ora anche in Id., Biglietti d’invito per una semiotica marcata. Milano: Bompiani, 2021).

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Martínez Quintanar, M. Á. (2007). La filosofía de Gilles Deleuze: Del empirismo transcendental al constructivismo pragmático. Santiago de Compostela: Servizo de Publicacións da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.

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Weitzmann, M. (2007). Deleuze, Guattari und die Sprache. München: GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/93291

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