With the aim in view to offer an outline of the current state of research announced by the title, the following lecture may choose one of three strategies: firstly, to present the contemporary panorama, secondly, to tell the evolutions and their phases, and finally, to study the effects of these developments in the past research. In consequence, it is the final strategy that will be adopted in the course of this invited address. The subject matter of the research topic to be presented is that of the semiotics of passions. Initially closely associated with narrative actants, their modalizations, and their actions, the semiotics of passions in some way replaced the traditional psychology of characters. Then, moved into the field of enunciation and communication, the passions recover the effects of Aristotelian ‘pathos’; they always concern actants but with a wide diffusion within a field (of enunciation, discourse, or communication). Reinvested in the field covered by socio-semiotics, passions change their nature: not only do they become collective, but they affect global situations, and not specifically actants. Ultimately, from the perspective of semiotic anthropology, passions participate in the constitution of modes of existence, anthropic typologies, and forms of life. In this evolution, quickly retraced in this survey, the passions gradually free themselves from narrativity, redeploy themselves in the constitution of anthropic worlds, and participate in the specification of these worlds. From the passions that inhabit and animate an acting body, the object of the subsequent research domain has thus moved on to ‘atmospheric’ passions (as in the pictorial perspective, called ‘atmospheric’). At the same time, the body and the flesh that bear them go through most of the possible modes of existence for semiotic body and flesh: individual, collective, and worldly (cf. the flesh of the world, or the passionate body of Gaia). And, more curiously, in these phase transitions, the passions have appeared to be increasingly difficult for specifying and naming purposes.

‍