La conflictualité en discours : le recours à l’injure dans les arènes publiques

Abstract

This paper aims at questioning the conditions under which verbal violence can appear as legitimate, and the description that is made of public spheres where it can appear as acceptable discourse. Our work builds on previous research about two types of corpora: controversies that received a lot of media coverage on the one hand, and books written by female politicians on the other hand, books that denounce the recourse to insults as a specific form taken by sexist violence in politics. Two different conceptions of the legitimate ethos in public debate underlie these types of discourse: on the one hand the debaters accept the recourse to offensive language as part of the rules of the political game, and on the other hand, verbal abuse is condemned as a form of symbolic violence. These conceptions are here confronted to a set of interdisciplinary publications, which can shed light on contexts in which insult can become acceptable or even legitimate. This paper particularly puts the emphasis on research dealing with the different models that underlie proceedings in public debate, and the place given to conflict or verbal violence within each of them.

Keywords

• abuse
• interdisciplinarity
• legitimate ethos
• public debate
• verbal violence