6 February 2023 – 16:30 – 18:30 (UTC+1)
Faculté ALLSH – Salle de colloques 2 – Bâtiment T1 Pôle multimédia and online conference with Zoom

Pr. Johannes ANGERMULLER (Open University) : “Truth in Post-Truth Politics? Discourse as a practice of social and epistemic valuation”

Abstract:

The rise of extremist right-wing leaders and movements is shaking up democracies all over the world. In my contribution, I will discuss this development in the context of a return of fascism. Fascism mobilised affective energies in the 1930s and those energies are unleashed once more again in contemporary social media discourse. Existing rationalist discourse theories often miss the affective dimension of fascist discourses. I will therefore go back to conceptualisations of fascism inspired by Critical Theory, psychoanalysis and poststructuralism for which discourse is not just about the rational negotiation of ideas, values and interests. I will relate these theoretical and historical considerations to some examples of contemporary populist discourse and ask how to account for the affective dimension in social media discourse.

References:

Abu-Lughod, L. and Lutz, C.A. (1990) ‘Introduction: Emotion, Discourse, and the Politics of Everyday Life’, in C.A. Lutz and L. Abu-Lughod (eds) Language and the Politics of Emotion. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–23.

Cleen, B.D. and Stavrakakis, Y. (2017) ‘Distinctions and Articulations: A Discourse Theoretical Framework for the Study of Populism and Nationalism’, Javnost – The Public. Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture, 24(4), pp. 301–319.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1980) Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Paris: Minuit.

Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (1995) Dialektik der Aufklärung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Iedema, R. (2020) Affected: On Becoming Undone and Potentiation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jameson, F. (1979) Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kranert, M. (ed.) (2020) Discursive approaches to populism across disciplines: the return of populists and the people. London: Palgrave.