mardi 15 avril 2025 – 18h – salle 126 St Charles 1
This lecture discusses the recent rhetorical fixation on blood within Donald Trump’s political discourse and the resonance of the term among his right-wing followers and supporters. The term ‘blood’ and the recurring theme of body politics have emerged as a recurring motif, operating both literally and metaphorically to evoke anxieties about national purity, vitality, and contamination. Trump’s phraseology often invokes imagery of conflictual or existential threats, drawing on long-standing and oft-employed tropes of body politics together with the metaphor of the nation as a wounded, raped and violated body in need of restoration and vindication. Furthermore, Trump manages to link the traditional metaphor of the body politic with the failed attempt to assassinate him on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania while on his campaign trail: images of Trump’s face streaming with blood have been instrumental in communicating the analogy between the body of the president and the body of the nation, thus reinforcing nationalist mythmaking.
Massimiliano Demata is Professor of English Linguistics at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society of the University of Turin, Italy. His research interests include discourses of nationalism and borders, conspiracy theories, the language of populism, and social media discourse. He has held research and teaching positions in France, Germany, Israel, Luxembourg, Sweden, the UK, and the USA. His latest work includes Discourses and Borders and the Nation in the USA (Routledge 2022) and the multi-authored book Voices of Supporter (John Benjamins 2023). He is also one of the co-editors of the Routledge Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation (Routledge 2024).
Ce séminaire est une séance préparatoire au colloque Expressivity, Bodies and Language in the 21st Century prévu les 20 et 21 novembre 2025 à l’Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry, organisé par Sandrine Sorlin (UMPV, EMMA, IUF) et Julie Neveux (Sorbonne Université, CELISO).