Tracés, n°43/2022

This issue of Tracés revisits the classic question of the social life of words and seeks to understand how the appearance of a term and its various potential meanings are socially produced and reproduced. In particular, it looks at the controversies surrounding the meaning of words and what they reveal about our societies and the functioning of language. If such metadiscursive moments, taking discourse as an object of debate, are an integral part of the social use of language, certain acts of naming are more conflictual than others, revealing an increased circulation of attacks and counterattacks on ways of saying. These tensions between semantic stability and instability raise four types of questions. How can we approach the temporality and rhythm of semantic transformations and the debates surrounding them? Who can act on the meaning of words, and through what devices? In what contexts and on what scales do these semantic conflicts arise? And finally, what can be done with the historicity of words, the discursive memory that is sometimes useful and sometimes cumbersome for social actors? In attempting to answer these questions, this volume adopts a conception of discourse and naming as practices caught in a tension between institution and negotiation in context, and considers them as a the place where stabilising and destabilising forces of meaning meet.