Travail de recherche/Working paper
| Résumé : | Authors in the field of critical discourse studies often have emancipatory – and therefore political and/or politicizing – aims in mind when they carry our and publish their research. Many among them have challenged the modes of representation and/or the discursive practices that reproduce social injustices within as well as outside of academia. Nevertheless, only a limited number of authors have provided a detailed account about what they understand by categories such as political discourse, politics and/ or the political. In this article, I present an overview of the way such notions have been thought and operationalized within the field of discourse studies. I start with a sketch of the state of the art in CDA in order to argue that more attention needs to be paid to the meta-political dimension of discursive practices. I argue that metapolitics differs from politics as usual in the sense that it potentially reconfigures existing modes of politics, the associated logics and rationalities, as well as the dominant power structures in a given public sphere. Metapolitical debates have the potential to reshape the very structure of the public realm as well as the entities and processes that constitute it. After distinguishing this understanding of the term from the way the New Right conceptualizes itself as a metapolitical project, I go on to show why the notion is relevant to critical and post-foundational studies of discourse, suggesting pathways for future investigation. |
