“Swallowing the Red Pill”: The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Political Imaginary of Stigmatized Knowledge in the Discourse of the Far-Right
https://doi.org/10.58186/2782-3660-2022-2-3-28-78
Abstract
Pandemic disease is not merely a biological reality but also a cognitive and socially constructed phenomenon which intensely mobilizes a multiplicity of political frames. Farright political entrepreneurs are, despite their remoteness from actual decisionmaking processes, active stakeholders in the current cri sis. Existential threats to societies breed a sense of urgency and heightened cultural warfare that is a hotbed for extremism. Our study seeks to map, com pare and contrast the symbolic responses to the Coronavirus crisis articulated by various farright actors in two established democracies in the transatlantic area: the United States and France. We aim to shed light on how entrenched farright mythologies and tropes—which appear increasingly transatlantic—are channeled into a new synthesis as part of an “alternative” political epistemolo gy. Infused with the mythos of resistance and insurgency, resolutely antisys temic, this alternative epistemology can better be described, following Michael Barkun, as a form of “stigmatized knowledge”. Our study will employ a Critical Discourse Analysis framework to bring into focus the ideological semiotics of the current “infodemic” in the EuroAmerican farright’s response to the COVID19 crisis. To some extent, all groups and actors under study exhibited a conspirac ist framework. We contend that conspiracist counterepistemologies are an integral — and increasingly important — part of the semiotics of the new culture wars which have engulfed the COVID19 response.
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Review
For citations:
Chapelan A. “Swallowing the Red Pill”: The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Political Imaginary of Stigmatized Knowledge in the Discourse of the Far-Right. Versus. 2022;2(3):28-78. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.58186/2782-3660-2022-2-3-28-78
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