LES MOTS DE LA CRISE : REGIMES DE CROYANCE ET FONCTIONNEMENT PASSIONNEL DANS LA PRESSE FRANÇAISE EN 2008

THE WORDS OF THE CRISIS: BELIEF SYSTEMS AND PASSIONAL FUNCTIONING IN THE FRENCH PRESS IN 2008

Abstract

The concept of crisis is often treated in terms of crisis of culture, problems of representation, or the search for values. This paper addresses the question of the economic and financial crisis as it manifested in 2008 and examines the issue of its thymic dimension in the journalistic discourse. The semiotic tools of textual analysis applied to a corpus of French newspaper articles (the Attali Report and the Madoff scandal) allow for the identification of the onset of a crisis situation and the description of its evolution. The theory of the systems of belief is combined with a micro-textual approach in order to question and problematize the following issues: how do the systems of belief and the axiological systems react to the crisis? How does a crisis overdetermine the expression of the identities of the actors as manifested in the newspaper?
Keywords: Economic crisis. Systems of belief. Passions. Thymic dimension. Focalisation.