By echoing and altering the title of Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal book (1980), Crises we live by stresses the role of embodied crisis experience(s). This introduction deepens our understanding of how the concept of crisis is conceptualised through a cluster of cognitive metaphors (activated or emphasised in line with recent or historical memories, political intentions, etc.), and additionally depends on a continuous re-elaboration over time and different cultural contexts. Being entirely embedded in Western tradition (and stemming from an Ancient Greek word), “crisis” has been permeated by the experiences and accounts of previous critical events (such as natural disasters, pandemics, and wars), which are part of collective memory and thus, through a metonymic process, stand for crisis.

In this paper, I discuss the conceptual metaphors used by Polybius to articulate notions of political crisis in Book 6 of his Histories. I begin by outlining Polybius’ theory of the cycle of constitutions and the mixed constitution. I then proceed to Polybius’ metaphors for constitutional crisis; these depend on domains involving structures, locations, seafaring, and biology. I further consider personification and the metaphor of balance that characterizes the mixed constitution. However, Polybius never uses the term ‘crisis’ (krisis) in discussing either the movement of a state through the cycle of constitutions or the collapse of the mixed constitution. Ancient historical texts, which precede the canonization our terminology, can therefore augment Koselleck’s thesis concerning the historicity and development of our vocabulary for crisis.

‘Crisis’ is among the most pervasive concepts of our time: we are living through a ‘permacrisis’. In times of crisis, metaphors flourish, with their capacity to frame events in different ways. A growing body of research investigates the metaphors used to communicate, and conceptualise, individual contemporary crises. This chapter argues the need to overcome fragmentation in crisis metaphor research and move towards a convergent approach, making sense of the common and diverging patterns in the metaphorical representations of the global societal challenges we are facing. Building especially on previous corpus work on crisis metaphors in media discourse, the chapter focuses on the metaphors used in relation to the global financial crisis and the Covid-19 health crisis in English, through a comparative perspective.

This chapter considers first-person narratives of life-changing injuries, which may lead to depression and identity crises before individuals can accept their condition. The study focuses on the metaphors used to describe the injury, recovery, and attitude towards life in a dataset of 67 extracts retrieved from healthtalk.org . Metaphor use evidences that traumatic injuries are lived as ontological experiences, including loss, new dispositions on the world, and reappraisals of the self. Contradictory conceptualisations, both across different individuals and within the same individual, reflect individuals’ struggle with ordinary adversities and highlight the complexity of recovery.

The Sars-CoV-2 pandemic has reignited the debate on the metaphors of illness. Susan Sontag’s contributions from the 1970s and 1980s continue to serve as a milestone in multidisciplinary discussions on figurative language: her conception of illness carries relevant consequences in different directions. The present essay unfolds in two parts. The first part retraces the 20th-century debate on metaphor, focusing particularly on the question of metaphoric truth, with an emphasis on Continental philosophy. The second part endeavours to reconstruct a sort of political “metaphorology” of the pandemic, also serving as a critical review of Sontag’s argument. Through a bio-linguistic and biopolitical reconsideration of the COVID crisis, it becomes evident that the “disease/war” dispositif is as radical as an absolute metaphor.

This paper explores Latin’s metaphorical construal of crisis, especially through the image of a storm. It shows that Latin speakers utilise the terms tempestas and procellae (both ‘storm’), along with a cluster of semantically related words, to convey this concept. It then goes on to argue that this metaphorical conceptualisation constitutes an ethnographic datum. The metaphor of “crisis” as a storm, it is argued, helps crystallise for Roman culture the idea that a crisis is both destructive and unpredictable, but also even potentially creative and beneficial. The paper thus aims to elucidate a highly conventionalised aspect of Latin’s figurative lexicon of “crisis” and to characterise, from an anthropological perspective, a distinctive aspect of Latin speakers’ worldview.

The climate debate tends to be polarised between hope for solutions (ecological utopia) and a lack of future perspectives (eco-anxiety, ecological dystopia). This contribution provides a linguistic, discursive, and figurative representation of the climate crisis by means of psychological and religious metaphors in French and Quebecois press discourse during the Cop26 political negotiations. Drawing on CMT and CMA, the corpus-driven analysis considers the mental lexicon shared by the francophone community through instances of subjectivation of the environmental issue linked to the climate ticking clock and its dystopian configuration. The eco-anxiety lexicon and multimodal representations appear to convey different sinister scenarios, shaping the symbolic dimensions of the crisis we live by via established but also emerging metaphors.

This article explores the discursive construction of metaphorical meaning in user-manufactured internet memes about the COVID-19 crisis. I emphasise the role of memes in digital amateur activism as an alternative means of political and social participation by perpetuating discussions that question official messages and subvert governmental measures. They do so through re-contextualising and de-legitimising which contributes to the discourse of solidarity. An important outcome of this research is the recognition that within memes it is the image involved that anchors metaphorical scenarios.

Greek mythology and Early Greek history were full of crises, including familial and civic strife or war. This is reflected in our extant sources of Archaic Greek literature, where crises are recurring and dominant themes. Though the events and effects of war and strife can be narrated directly, uncertainty and crisis are also abstract concepts: as such, within the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), they can also be expected to be conceived of and expressed through metaphors. This paper focuses on two source domains of varying specificity and detail that are employed in Early Greek poetry to conceptualise critical situations concerning physical imbalance and the sea/seafaring, and discusses different instantiations and allegorical scenarios of the conceptual metaphors uncertainty is unbalance and danger is the sea.

This contribution explores the metaphors for crisis in connection with the emergence of a culture of dissent in East Asia, in particular in Confucianism. Both topics are intimately related inasmuch as crisis can be a catalyst for, a result of, and a threat to such a culture. We suggest that these “critical” junctions are reflected in the metaphoric expression of liminal situations. This hypothesis is substantiated with textual materials from ancient China and Chosŏn Korea. The Chinese materials afford insights into the development of the metaphoric field of crisis and the unfolding of its implications, while the Korean materials serve to test how these played out in long durée, demonstrating their continued productive vitality.

Ancient Roman political discourse shows various competing metaphors in relation to the so-called “crisis of the Roman Republic” of the I century BC. The metaphor of a collapsing building proves itself particularly fit for conveying the concept of crisis, as it appears to be a conceptual blending, binding together various ideas and images, especially the connected imagery of ruins. This paper aims to show how, during a specific historical moment, such a timeworn metaphor was activated and manipulated by Cicero to convey a personal political message. In addition to proving the historical impact of this rhetorical re-invention of a conceptual metaphor, it supports the idea that crisis metaphors often bear culture-based associations and political implications, and can even influence policy making.

Which metaphors can be employed to account for a crisis of sexuality? And how is mathematics even related to such a crisis? At the end of the 18th century, Rousseau viewed mathematics as a “safe place” which should be protected from such crises of sexuality. At the beginning of the 20th century, Freud highlighted the contrary, presenting mathematics as a “treacherous space” where such crises could very well erupt. To analyse this metaphorical transition, I will turn to Hans Blumenberg, whose theory reveals Rousseau’s and Freud’s works as background metaphors, which also operated in 19th century mathematical discourse. Blumenberg himself reflects on this transition via the shipwreck metaphor, which was also adopted by Freud and Rousseau, albeit in other frameworks.

By echoing and altering the title of Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal book (1980), Crises we live by stresses the role of embodied crisis experience(s). This introduction deepens our understanding of how the concept of crisis is conceptualised through a cluster of cognitive metaphors (activated or emphasised in line with recent or historical memories, political intentions, etc.), and additionally depends on a continuous re-elaboration over time and different cultural contexts. Being entirely embedded in Western tradition (and stemming from an Ancient Greek word), “crisis” has been permeated by the experiences and accounts of previous critical events (such as natural disasters, pandemics, and wars), which are part of collective memory and thus, through a metonymic process, stand for crisis.

In this paper, I discuss the conceptual metaphors used by Polybius to articulate notions of political crisis in Book 6 of his Histories. I begin by outlining Polybius’ theory of the cycle of constitutions and the mixed constitution. I then proceed to Polybius’ metaphors for constitutional crisis; these depend on domains involving structures, locations, seafaring, and biology. I further consider personification and the metaphor of balance that characterizes the mixed constitution. However, Polybius never uses the term ‘crisis’ (krisis) in discussing either the movement of a state through the cycle of constitutions or the collapse of the mixed constitution. Ancient historical texts, which precede the canonization our terminology, can therefore augment Koselleck’s thesis concerning the historicity and development of our vocabulary for crisis.

‘Crisis’ is among the most pervasive concepts of our time: we are living through a ‘permacrisis’. In times of crisis, metaphors flourish, with their capacity to frame events in different ways. A growing body of research investigates the metaphors used to communicate, and conceptualise, individual contemporary crises. This chapter argues the need to overcome fragmentation in crisis metaphor research and move towards a convergent approach, making sense of the common and diverging patterns in the metaphorical representations of the global societal challenges we are facing. Building especially on previous corpus work on crisis metaphors in media discourse, the chapter focuses on the metaphors used in relation to the global financial crisis and the Covid-19 health crisis in English, through a comparative perspective.

This chapter considers first-person narratives of life-changing injuries, which may lead to depression and identity crises before individuals can accept their condition. The study focuses on the metaphors used to describe the injury, recovery, and attitude towards life in a dataset of 67 extracts retrieved from healthtalk.org . Metaphor use evidences that traumatic injuries are lived as ontological experiences, including loss, new dispositions on the world, and reappraisals of the self. Contradictory conceptualisations, both across different individuals and within the same individual, reflect individuals’ struggle with ordinary adversities and highlight the complexity of recovery.

The Sars-CoV-2 pandemic has reignited the debate on the metaphors of illness. Susan Sontag’s contributions from the 1970s and 1980s continue to serve as a milestone in multidisciplinary discussions on figurative language: her conception of illness carries relevant consequences in different directions. The present essay unfolds in two parts. The first part retraces the 20th-century debate on metaphor, focusing particularly on the question of metaphoric truth, with an emphasis on Continental philosophy. The second part endeavours to reconstruct a sort of political “metaphorology” of the pandemic, also serving as a critical review of Sontag’s argument. Through a bio-linguistic and biopolitical reconsideration of the COVID crisis, it becomes evident that the “disease/war” dispositif is as radical as an absolute metaphor.

This paper explores Latin’s metaphorical construal of crisis, especially through the image of a storm. It shows that Latin speakers utilise the terms tempestas and procellae (both ‘storm’), along with a cluster of semantically related words, to convey this concept. It then goes on to argue that this metaphorical conceptualisation constitutes an ethnographic datum. The metaphor of “crisis” as a storm, it is argued, helps crystallise for Roman culture the idea that a crisis is both destructive and unpredictable, but also even potentially creative and beneficial. The paper thus aims to elucidate a highly conventionalised aspect of Latin’s figurative lexicon of “crisis” and to characterise, from an anthropological perspective, a distinctive aspect of Latin speakers’ worldview.

The climate debate tends to be polarised between hope for solutions (ecological utopia) and a lack of future perspectives (eco-anxiety, ecological dystopia). This contribution provides a linguistic, discursive, and figurative representation of the climate crisis by means of psychological and religious metaphors in French and Quebecois press discourse during the Cop26 political negotiations. Drawing on CMT and CMA, the corpus-driven analysis considers the mental lexicon shared by the francophone community through instances of subjectivation of the environmental issue linked to the climate ticking clock and its dystopian configuration. The eco-anxiety lexicon and multimodal representations appear to convey different sinister scenarios, shaping the symbolic dimensions of the crisis we live by via established but also emerging metaphors.

This article explores the discursive construction of metaphorical meaning in user-manufactured internet memes about the COVID-19 crisis. I emphasise the role of memes in digital amateur activism as an alternative means of political and social participation by perpetuating discussions that question official messages and subvert governmental measures. They do so through re-contextualising and de-legitimising which contributes to the discourse of solidarity. An important outcome of this research is the recognition that within memes it is the image involved that anchors metaphorical scenarios.

Greek mythology and Early Greek history were full of crises, including familial and civic strife or war. This is reflected in our extant sources of Archaic Greek literature, where crises are recurring and dominant themes. Though the events and effects of war and strife can be narrated directly, uncertainty and crisis are also abstract concepts: as such, within the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), they can also be expected to be conceived of and expressed through metaphors. This paper focuses on two source domains of varying specificity and detail that are employed in Early Greek poetry to conceptualise critical situations concerning physical imbalance and the sea/seafaring, and discusses different instantiations and allegorical scenarios of the conceptual metaphors uncertainty is unbalance and danger is the sea.

This contribution explores the metaphors for crisis in connection with the emergence of a culture of dissent in East Asia, in particular in Confucianism. Both topics are intimately related inasmuch as crisis can be a catalyst for, a result of, and a threat to such a culture. We suggest that these “critical” junctions are reflected in the metaphoric expression of liminal situations. This hypothesis is substantiated with textual materials from ancient China and Chosŏn Korea. The Chinese materials afford insights into the development of the metaphoric field of crisis and the unfolding of its implications, while the Korean materials serve to test how these played out in long durée, demonstrating their continued productive vitality.

Ancient Roman political discourse shows various competing metaphors in relation to the so-called “crisis of the Roman Republic” of the I century BC. The metaphor of a collapsing building proves itself particularly fit for conveying the concept of crisis, as it appears to be a conceptual blending, binding together various ideas and images, especially the connected imagery of ruins. This paper aims to show how, during a specific historical moment, such a timeworn metaphor was activated and manipulated by Cicero to convey a personal political message. In addition to proving the historical impact of this rhetorical re-invention of a conceptual metaphor, it supports the idea that crisis metaphors often bear culture-based associations and political implications, and can even influence policy making.

Which metaphors can be employed to account for a crisis of sexuality? And how is mathematics even related to such a crisis? At the end of the 18th century, Rousseau viewed mathematics as a “safe place” which should be protected from such crises of sexuality. At the beginning of the 20th century, Freud highlighted the contrary, presenting mathematics as a “treacherous space” where such crises could very well erupt. To analyse this metaphorical transition, I will turn to Hans Blumenberg, whose theory reveals Rousseau’s and Freud’s works as background metaphors, which also operated in 19th century mathematical discourse. Blumenberg himself reflects on this transition via the shipwreck metaphor, which was also adopted by Freud and Rousseau, albeit in other frameworks.