Language and Dialogue - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2017

In this article, we propose to mobilize a communicative constitutive approach to analyze sessions that took place in the context of online suicide prevention chats in France. By analyzing the detail of a specific excerpt, we propose, more precisely, to draw a portrait of various figures that appear to express themselves in what could be called online help in action (see also Bartesaghi, 2014 ). Beyond the various psychotherapeutic approaches that are supposed to inform what volunteers are saying and doing, our goal is to start with their practices to determine the figures that they implicitly or explicitly stage in their turns of talk to help out the callers. By analyzing the relational aspects of these conversations, we thus show that these sessions can be compared to a form of modern exorcism, where the callers’ distress, uneasiness or suffering is meant to pass in and through the conversations. It is the conditions of these passages that we are exploring, especially regarding the tensions that they generate.

This article examines the challenge of partisanship to the free and open communication entailed by rich notions of democracy. Exploring the vexing riddle of how democratic citizens can balance openness and assertiveness in their dialogic interactions, I turn to the American pragmatist tradition for two important starting points. Drawing from William James and John Dewey, I highlight how the pragmatist tradition provides a nuanced reading of charity, both towards individuals and to situations. Charity is a choice of disposition, and it has vital implications for pragmatist rhetoric’s drive to instantiate a deep sense of democratic communication.

This essay investigates three distinct modalities of the dialogic: dialogic mind, dialogic praxis, and dialogic ethics. Although each modality shares central dialogic characteristics of polyphony, polymodality, and polychronicity ( Bakhtin, 1981 , 1984 , 1986 ; Lipari, 2014 ), each also differs in important ways, some of which are lost by using the single word ‘dialogue’ to refer to them. Rather, I will here explore how the dialogic is not merely a mode of communicative praxis, but it is also a mode of communicative consciousness and a mode of communicative ethics. Each dialogic modality describes different manifestations of what might otherwise be called the dialogic; each mode differs from the others in important ways while also sharing similar attributes.

IADA History not only refers to the series of conferences and workshops which have been organized since the foundation of the Association but also to the discussions about a unified concept of dialogue which accompanied IADA’s activities during the last three decades. On the one hand, there is the basic question of what constitutes dialogue, while on the other hand there are multiple approaches which claim to be acknowledged as dialogic approaches. If we do not want to accept the plurality of models in the sense of ‘anything goes’ we need to address the difficult issue of how far individual models can contribute to an investigation of dialogue as a complex whole.

This essay examines the importance of semioethics in relationship to the work of Levinas. The interplay of semioethics and Levinas’s commitment to “ethics as first philosophy” announces the communicative height and weight of a semiotic signification that demands responsive human action. Semioethics is a communicative act that wades through the plethora of signs in the global communication production system with the objective of discerning signs of ill health that curtail care of life. Semioethics necessitates attentiveness and responsiveness to Otherness and difference. Semioethics functions as resistance, the unwillingness to accept and abide within an unreflective communication production system composed of taken-for-granted sameness of process and procedure.

This paper interrogates the phenomenological experience of enchantment as a sign process. I argue that our ethical intentionality in the world is significantly enhanced when we understand how the aesthetics of enchantment conditions the very possibility of such an ethic as a semiotic phenomenological event of dialogue. First, I discuss a key problematic of contemporary life – our culture of distraction and its impact on our dialogic relations. Next, I outline my thematic – enchantment as consequence of sign actions, both in what I call its “inauthentic” and “authentic” forms. Third, I interpret each form and their impact on the ethics of dialogic relations. Finally, I contend that authentic enchantment, as a semiotic interpretant, signifies an “answering comprehension” or unique expression that resonates with the greater whole, the greater good – demonstrating what Susan Petrilli describes as a productive or pragmatic semioethic.

In this paper, I engage with the question of historical interpretation as a form of dialogue that can face an individual conscience with disturbing choices and decisions made at an earlier time, and the expectations we might have about a proper response. My paper draws on Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical ideas, as well as on a controversial part of his biography – his alleged involvement in the Petain circle in France in the early 1940s – to propose that instead of thinking about historical knowledge as reconstruction of another time, revelation of beliefs, or even exposure of intentions, we should consider it as a form of dialogical remembering that marks two joint features of subjectivity: fallibility and attestation. My paper does articulate a defense of Ricoeur’s philosophical conception of forgiveness, but offers neither an apology for nor an accusation on moral and political grounds.