This issue of Aleph. Languages, Media and Societies examines contemporary forms of symbolic conflictuality from a privileged site of observation: public discourse as it unfolds through journalistic, televisual, institutional, digital, diplomatic, cinematic, and iconic mediations. The aim is not merely to describe discourses about conflicts, crises, or controversies. It is, more fundamentally, to understand how discourse itself produces scenes of conflict, how it distributes positions of enunciation, institutes adversaries, names collectives, categorises figures of alterity, dramatises public emotions, and stabilises regimes of visibility.
Symbolic conflictuality is understood here as a set of struggles that operate not first through material force, but through acts of naming, framing, qualification, disqualification, affective dramatisation, erasure, and heroisation. It involves words, images, gestures, headlines, proper names, formulaic sequences, fixed expressions, media dispositifs, and argumentative architectures. It is enacted in the public sphere whenever an event is framed as a crisis, a people is constructed as a political subject, an adversary is reduced to a threatening figure, or a proper name becomes an emblem, a stigma, a memory, or a counter-discourse.
The contributions gathered in this issue show that the media are never mere channels of information. They are operators in the symbolic organisation of social reality. They select, hierarchise, accentuate, dramatise, attenuate, render visible, or leave in obscurity. The crises in Gaza and Ukraine, Franco-Algerian tensions, far-right discourse, presidential debates, crisis press releases, populist discourse, the journalistic archives of Al-Ahram, images of Palestine, emotions circulating on social media, the proper names of illustrious women, and journalistic designations of the Algerian Other are not juxtaposed objects. They form a coherent problematic constellation: how do societies name what divides them, how do they mediatise what affects them, and how does discourse transform conflict into forms that are symbolically shareable, contestable, or imposable?
The first major axis of the issue concerns the media framing of political and cultural alterities. The articles devoted to far-right discourse on French television, Algerian and American diplomatic discourse on Gaza and Ukraine, populist discourse in the Moroccan public sphere, and republican Islam in the French public sphere all demonstrate that public speech constructs a world of reference. It does not merely state what is; it proposes a distribution of the legitimate and the illegitimate, the proximate and the distant, the national and the foreign, the reasonable and the threatening. In such discourses, the Other is never simply designated: the Other is configured. It is assigned a position within a political syntax, a value within an argumentative economy, and a function within a polemical scene.
This becomes especially visible when media discourse racialises, culturalises, or securitises alterity. The Algerian, the migrant, the Muslim, the people, the West, Gaza, Ukraine, France, or Algeria are not only geopolitical or sociological referents. They become discursive units invested with affects, memories, and presuppositions. Public discourse then operates through condensation: it gathers within a single lexical form a long history, a series of stereotypes, mnemonic wounds, strategies of legitimisation, and ideological expectations. Symbolic conflict resides precisely in this condensation: a single word may hold together a territory, a colonial memory, an accusation, a fear, a debt, a resentment, or a claim.
The second major axis concerns phraseology, understood not as a mere repertoire of fixed expressions, but as a mode of ideological stabilisation within discourse. Crisis phraseologisms, recurrent syntagms, media formulae, lexical repetitions, and preferential associations between certain names and certain predicates function as instruments of interpretative closure. They orient reception even before explicit argumentation begins to unfold. When a diplomatic relation is regularly described through the vocabulary of crisis, tension, rupture, slippage, normalisation, or appeasement, the reader does not encounter a raw event; he or she enters a pre-structured regime of intelligibility.
Phraseology thus possesses a subtle but powerful political force. It naturalises associations, renders some interpretations readily available, and excludes others. It may confine an event within the lexicon of threat, urgency, indignation, resistance, or reparation. It produces what may be called the short memory of discourse: a memory made up of repeated segments, recognisable turns of phrase, institutionalised collocations, and sequences that appear self-evident because they have already circulated. The formula then becomes an argumentative shortcut. It does not always demonstrate; it recalls, reactivates, predisposes.
In Franco-Algerian relations, this phraseology acquires a particular density. It carries the traces of a historical dispute never fully stabilised. The expressions of crisis, memory, repentance, sovereignty, interference, recognition, or reconciliation do not function as simple lexical units. They are caught within a discursive archive in which each term summons competing regimes of speech. Phraseology becomes the site of a struggle over the very definition of shared history: to name the crisis is also to determine who may speak, from which memory, in the name of which legitimacy, and according to which temporality.
The third major axis — and arguably one of the most structurally significant — concerns the adventures of the proper name. The proper name runs through this issue as a decisive theoretical thread. It appears in the analyses of proper names in French-language Algerian journalistic texts, in the study of illustrious women as counter-discourse to gender stereotypes, and in corpora devoted to Razika Adnani, Macron, Le Pen, Danone, Al-Ahram, Gaza, Jerusalem, or press headlines in which names of places and persons become operators of framing. The proper name is not here a mere referential label. It is a discursive event.
Its force derives from the fact that it appears to designate directly, while in fact transporting layers of interpretation. A proper name individualises, but it may also typify. It singularises, but it may become an emblem. It identifies, but it may expose, glorify, degrade, suspect, assign, or repair. In media discourse, the proper name is seldom neutral: it enters syntactic constructions, adjectival networks, chains of coreference, headlines, captions, portraits, oppositions, and hierarchies. It may be positioned as an acting subject, a victimised patient, a responsible agent, a threat, a witness, or a symbol.
The “adventures” of the proper name are therefore multiple. There is, first, its referential adventure: the proper name anchors discourse in a being, a place, an institution, or a memory. There is then its categorical adventure: the proper name may slide from the singular to the collective, becoming the name of a cause, a movement, an epoch, or a wound. There is also its argumentative adventure: to cite a name is often to summon an ethos, a camp, an authority, or a controversy. Finally, there is its memorial adventure: certain names become discursive sites of memory because they condense a shared past, a violence, a debt, or a promise.
From this perspective, naming is never an innocent act. To name an illustrious woman may be to reopen a space of recognition against the erasure produced by gender stereotypes. To name the Algerian within far-right discourse may be to inscribe him within a grammar of threat, incompatibility, or suspicion. To name Gaza or Jerusalem is to activate a saturated visual, political, religious, and geopolitical memory. To name Al-Ahram is to allow a media institution to appear simultaneously as archive, witness, and producer of frames. To name Danone in a crisis press release is to inscribe a corporation within an economy of responsibility, reparation, and credibility.
The proper name thus functions as a semiotic crossroads. It articulates referent, archive, affect, and argument. It may serve as a weapon of stigmatisation, but also as an instrument of rehabilitation. It may imprison within an assigned identity, or open a scene of counter-nomination. This dimension is particularly important in the contributions that analyse the proper names of illustrious women as counter-discourse to gender stereotypes. There, the proper name becomes an act of symbolic resistance: it undoes socially produced anonymity, opposes exemplary singularity to stereotypical generalisation, and transforms memory into an argumentative resource.
The fourth major axis concerns public emotions. The articles devoted to Corriere della Sera headlines during the first wave of Covid-19, Danone’s crisis press releases, reactive gesturality in the Macron-Le Pen presidential debate, the iconisation of emotions on social media, and photojournalism from Gaza show that affects are not merely psychological contents. They are organised discursive and media forms. Fear, risk, compassion, indignation, credibility, vulnerability, mourning, resistance, and hope are constructed through lexical choices, iconic framings, bodily postures, media temporalities, and regimes of repetition.
Public emotion is not simply felt; it is staged, distributed, authorised, or disqualified. The media grant visibility to certain emotions while marginalising others. They may humanise a victim, abstract a collective, dramatise a risk, neutralise a violence, render the unbearable bearable, or transform pain into a shareable image. The analysis of older adults in photojournalism from Gaza after 7 October 2023 thus places at the centre a decisive ethical question: how can vulnerability be shown without being visually consumed? How can visibility be produced without reproducing symbolic violence? How can the image become not merely an object of emotion, but a site of responsibility?
The fifth major axis concerns regimes of visibility. The contributions grouped under the methodological section, particularly those devoted to Palestinian cinema, resistance song, photojournalism, and social media, move the analysis beyond the verbal alone towards multimodal arrangements. They remind us that symbolic conflicts also unfold through images, sounds, gestures, cinematic framings, musical reprises, digital montages, and circulating icons. Contemporary media no longer strictly separate text and image; they articulate them within dispositifs in which seeing, naming, and feeling become interdependent operations.
Jerusalem, in Palestinian cinema, is not reducible to a setting. It becomes an obscured city, a space of memory, and a scene of visual resistance. The song “Ya mawili al-hawa” is not merely a musical archive; it is reconfigured as discourse, image, and memory of struggle. Emotions on social media are not simply expressed; they are iconised, that is, converted into shareable, memorable, circulating signs. The visible therefore becomes a terrain of symbolic confrontation: what is shown, what is concealed, what is reframed, what is repeated, and what becomes viral all participate in the construction of contemporary conflicts.
The scientific value of this issue lies precisely in its articulation of discourse, media, and symbolic conflictualities. The articles do not treat media as simple supports, nor discourses as simple contents. They examine dispositifs in which enunciation, argumentation, pathos, ethos, naming, memory, image, and power are interwoven. The public sphere appears here as a field of struggle for the imposition of legitimate categories of perception. Defining a crisis, qualifying a people, naming a woman, framing a war, staging an emotion, citing an institution, archiving an event, or figuring a city: all these gestures participate in one and the same symbolic economy.
This issue therefore invites us to move beyond overly simple oppositions between discourse and reality, information and opinion, emotion and reason, image and text. It shows that contemporary conflicts are also conflicts of description. They concern the ways in which events are made sayable, visible, and memorable. They involve the words available for speaking of violence, the names recognised as legitimate, the images authorised to circulate, the emotions deemed receivable, and the frames through which publics interpret what happens.
Aleph. Languages, Media and Societies here continues an orientation that is its own: to think languages, media, and societies in their mutual implication, that is, in the sites where semiotic forms produce social effects. The contributions gathered in this issue do not merely apply models; they test situated objects, multilingual corpora, heterogeneous media scenes, national and transnational archives, and textual as well as visual materials. They outline a scientific space in which discourse analysis meets pragmatics, semiotics, argumentation studies, media studies, the sociolinguistics of naming, and the analysis of public affects.
The central interrogation carried by this issue may therefore be formulated as follows: what do public discourses do to conflicts when they name them, frame them, repeat them, visualise them, and affectively charge them? This question entails a scientific responsibility. It requires the meticulous description of forms, but also an understanding of the effects of those forms. It obliges us to observe words without forgetting the institutions that bear them; images without forgetting the frames that render them legible; proper names without forgetting the memories they transport; emotions without forgetting the dispositifs that organise them.
In this sense, the articles brought together here form less an inventory of cases than a cartography of the symbolic operations through which contemporary societies narrate their conflicts to themselves. They show that discourse does not come after conflict as a secondary commentary; it is within conflict as one of its constitutive modalities. It may intensify it, displace it, ritualise it, pacify it, mask it, or render it thinkable. It is this power of discourse — the power of naming, framing, visibility, and memory — that this issue seeks to bring to light.