La pornografia dell’antiterrorismo: la retorica dello scontro di civiltà nella rappresentazione degli attentati di Parigi

Abstract

This article compares Baudrillard's theory of media and terrorism and the results of a research conducted on the cultural, ritual and institutional elaboration following the ISIS attacks in Paris (7-9^th January and 13^th November 2015).

The empirical basis is constituted by a frame analysis conducted on three heterogeneous corpuses of data: the Republican march of January 2015; the presidential speech held by François Hollande in Versailles on 16^th November 2015; the journalistic representation of the attacks of November 13^th, on the three main French newspapers (Le Monde, Le Figaro, Le Parisien). The analysis let us understand how, on the French side, the attacks themselves were reframed in terms of a cultural trauma (Alexander et al. 2004), through the redefinition of collective memory and the reproduction of a new mythological opposition between Western and Islamic civilizations (Huntington, 1993).

The conclusions will briefly discuss how Baudrillad’s model could be applied to the considered empirical case and how his theory relates to Durkheimian and neo-Durkhemian sociology