Between compassion and pity: tensives modulations

Abstract

Our main goal is contributing to a specific aggiornamento of semiotic models regarding the analysis of passions, checking the scope and interest of a perceptive, sensitive and affective approach to meaning, as far as these features are involved in pathemic interactions. We wish to understand passional settings in the very event of semiosis, not just on the basis of a performance/action perspective, but rather in a perceptive framework. Attention will be paid to some analog (yet not identical) passions, e. g. pity and compassion, in different kinds of texts, in order to verify if and to what extent these same passions bring up distinct ways subjects perceive and interact with each other. This description should then provide some insight for a typology of passions based upon tensive aspects of pathemic sets, which we believe could help understanding of these phenomena both in their nature/their development in discourse, and in their persuasive effects. Thus we hope to contribute, with our local descriptions and close readings of different texts, to the re-examination of the rhetorical legacy and its growing place in current semiotic research. (AU)