Dalla fine all'inizio. La presa estetica nelle catastrofi come momento di passaggio da una vecchia a una nuova visione del mondo

Catastrophes are moments in which it can be difficult to find a meaning of the experiences people go through, but if one looks at the way they are told, both in fictional and in factual texts, it is easy to see the presence of a sort of a cultural model that is used to frame them. It can be entitled “from the end to the beginning”: an old and inappropriate way to see oneself and the world ends and another one rises, so that an acceptable vision of the future can be imagined. The core of this narration is what the semiotician Algirdas Greimas (1987) used to call prise esthétique. This article aims at describing this theoretical concept and the way it can be used to understand the way people find a meaning in the experience of a catastrophe. Moreover, by using examples of prises esthétiques in the narrations of catastrophes, an attempt will be done to give a new definition of this topic, from a sociosemiotic point of view.