Publications

Publication details [#19627423]

Marino, Gabriele. 2021. Metafora della guerra e guerra alla metafora.: Una polemica di prospettiva. Visual Culture Studies 2 : 61–76. URL
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
Italian

Abstract

War metaphors referring to the Covid-19 pandemic - overused by the media and politicians, but also employed in everyday language by infected people themselves - have been severely and extensively criticised. Classical studies on the pervasiveness and performativity of metaphors and on their ‘romanticising’ use in the healthcare context have been cited in this respect. But the use of metaphors, as philosophy of language reminds us, is ‘consubstantial’ (i.e. there is no such thing as a neutral language, or a surreptitiously ideologised one); at the same time, comparing like with like (as many have done by referring to other historical epidemics) does not necessarily prove to be a better semiotic strategy: one compares war and epidemic precisely by recognising that the two are different things. The contribution reflects on these intertwining discursive tensions and suggests how a genuinely semiotic approach to the question cannot coincide with an anti-metaphorical, mechanistic, referentialist, reductionist prescriptivist stance. Semiotics should place itself in the middle, knowing that words have their effectiveness and capacity to act, but also that they should not be considered in absolute terms. They make, make us believe, and make us do things, but they are not invincible magic spells, nor do we all use them in the same sense, in the same way, or for the same purposes. On this ‘tropephobia’, on this orthorexia, in short, semiotics has at least something to (re)say.