Returning to Refrains: Félix, Gilles and the Semiotic Troubadour

Abstract

This article revisits Félix Guattari’s contribution to semiotic theory by highlighting his often overlooked role in shaping the conceptual framework associated with Deleuze and Guattari. While Deleuze is frequently seen as the main philosophical architect of their collaboration, the article argues that Guattari acted as a key “semiotic finder” (trouveur), reworking concepts from structural linguistics and semiotics – especially those of Hjelmslev – into a broader machinic and ontological perspective. Through a close reading of Guattari’s 1987 essay Ritournelles et affects existentiels, the paper examines how notions such as refrain, existential affects, and abstract machines contribute to a rethinking of expression, subjectivation, and consistency. Against the relative closure of structural semiotics, Guattari develops an open, process-oriented model in which the strata of expression and content are continuously deterritorialized and recomposed. In this framework, the refrain (ritournelle) appears as a minimal semiotic operator that produces territories of sense and affect, while diagrammatic processes act as vectors of transformation beyond structural limits. By placing these ideas in dialogue with Greimasian semiotics, the semiotics of passions, and Peircean diagrammatism, the article argues that Guattari anticipates a post-structural and ecological approach to semiotics, attentive to intensities, material conditions, and forms of life. Finally, in the context of contemporary capitalism – understood as a generalized semiotic field – Guattari’s work provides conceptual tools for rethinking subjectivity, media environments, and the emergence of new modes of collective individuation at the margins of the Capitalocene.