A Dividual Semiotics: From Nietzsche to Deleuze

The paper focuses on the notion of dividual. After the Post-scriptum sur les societés de contrôle (Deleuze 1992), this notion has been widely interpreted as the outcome of a crisis of the western notion of individuum, induced by the passage from the disciplinary to the control society. However, Deleuze had already used the term “dividual” in reference to cinema (Deleuze 1986) and to opera (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), without negative political implications. Furthermore, the term dividuum is borrowed by Friedrich Nietzsche (1980), who employed it to describe the internal struggle which is the condition of moral though. In this framework, the paper proposes a different interpretation of the term “dividual”. Semiotics is dividual: after Hjelmslev (1969), every semiotic process can be considered as a relation between two planes (expression and content) which, at the same time, are not independent, being in a relation of reciprocal presupposition. Thus, the term “dividual” is referred to a collective entity, related to a specific affect, belonging to a semiotic plane whose elements undergo to qualitative changes when grouped together