L'ironie connivente dans l'argumentaire politique: Le cas de la campagne présidentielle française de 2012

Abstract

Enunciation, as a pretext for conniving communication, suggests rhetorical strategies for legitimizing political discourse. It constructs decisive issues where symbolic hegemony sponsors the argumentation operating through shared insinuations, nuanced with humor or incongruity for persuasive purposes.
To this effect, irony proves to be a complex discursive device impacting the reception universe by disqualifying the opponent, constructing a communal interpretation, and circumventing the limits of political debate. Contextualized by an intense media flow generating a fragmentation of audiences while establishing an intellectual disposition toward choices deemed plausible, it offers possibilities for a dialectical analysis of the tumult of polemical discourses based on the unsaid and veiled denunciation.
Radically opposed, the two presidential styles, Sarkozy's and Hollande's, argue through sarcasm, exploiting a gaping economic crisis permeating a demanding society.
At the crossroads of linguistic pragmatics and the sociology of language, our study aims to analyze the exchanges of ritualized political confrontation in order to understand the functioning of complicit irony, constituted as speech acts that shape human interactions and symbolically structure their shared world.