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Raymond Coulon, "The alien as a soft target for exorcizing
violence", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law X/28
(1997), 37-53: Using the Greimassian model of semiotics, this paper looks
at the French legislative discourse on immigration as the surface realisation
of a deeper narrative stereotype [see B.S. Jackson, Making Sense in Law
(Deborah Charles Publications, 1995), 181-193]. Focussing on the thematic
construction of meaning, it seeks to account for the transformation of a
scapegoating type of problem-solving narrative into the archetypal narrative
of exorcizing violence. It argues that this change of narrative goals is
achieved through paradigmatic substitutions affecting the actantial figures
of alien and national. Each substitution re-configures the Subject's perception
of, and relationship with the alien. Ultimately, when all the traits which
they have in common (being victims, being human) have been blotted out and
the alien has been demonized, there is only one thing to do and that is
to exorcize it. The paper further argues that this end goal will be recognised
as all the more desirable and achievable, if the narratives associated with
paradigmatic substitutions touch off the psychotropic power of the myths
and mythical figures embedded in the narratives which inform the Subject's
thematic construction of meaning.
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