A critical-discursive analysis of the West/East polarization in the controversy over the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine

Abstract

This article is based on between freedom of speech versus ethics limits for the practice of humor, it was evoked from the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in 2015,  seeking in the scope of Critical Discourse Analysis, by Teun van Dijk (1998, 2005, 2015, 2016), and the Theory of Polemic, by Ruth Amossy (2017), to investigate how the ways of presentation and qualifications of the actors involved interfere in the debate and rekindle the polarization between Westerns and Easterns in the Brazilian journalistic discourse. Based on the analysis of excerpts of nine texts from Folha de S. Paulo, published after the attack, we analyze the polarization between groups and the description strategies of actors involved: in one hand, terrorists, Muslims (Easterns), who committed the attack, and, on the other, the victims (Westerns). The results of this article allow us to notice the Eurocentric semantics and the asymmetry in the news coverage, it can serve to analyze other violent and more recent facts about the humor production and also to update aspects of Eurocentric discourse in the contemporaneity based on an innovative theoretic articulation.