Revisiting Greimasian figurativity, and making the notion do more work in semiotics of text

Abstract This article is a concise reconstruction of the notion of figure in Greimas’ work. The article begins by briefly discussing a couple of recent contributions to a general outlook on Greimasian figure and figurativity. It then proceeds with a more detailed reconstruction of the notion of figure in Greimas’ work, which has been lacking in English. Besides the attempt at reconstruction, the article presents a thesis that, in so-called standard Greimasian semiotics of text, figure has been reduced to an empty site for two kinds of indexicals, and thus deprived of its original textual-analytic potential. This textual-analytic potential concerns spanning the divide between text and percept, which reflects the interest of Greimas’ original notion of figure. With this in mind, the final chapter of the article presents a couple of brief attempts at a figurative textual-semiotic analysis.