Is a “Deleuzian Semiotics” Possible? Deleuze, Guattari and the Definition of Semiotics in Mille Plateaux

Abstract

This article aims to define the concept of semiotics within the framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, with particular reference to A Thousand Plateaus and their theorization of regimes of signs. The objective is not so much a historiographical reconstruction as it is an analysis of the foundational and epistemological dimensions that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to semiotics and, more broadly, to the understanding of signs. Furthermore, this theme leads us to the core of their critique of structuralism and of a perspective that privileges verbal language over other types of signs, along a trajectory that brings into play Saussure and Peirce, Greimas and Lacan, Spinoza and Proust, culminating in Hjelmslev.