Colloque - Discours de réaction : répertoires nationaux et transnationaux

Conference: Discourse of reaction: national and transnational repertoires

Université libre de Bruxelles, September 8-9, 2025 

The rise of conservative, radical and far-right discourse in the Western world is increasingly drawing the attention of researchers in the humanities and social sciences. According to Albert Hirschman’s pioneering work (1991), “reactionary rhetoric” has historically unfolded in three major waves: reaction against human rights, reaction against universal suffrage, and, finally, reaction against the welfare state. Today, however, reactionary rhetoric seems to be targeting social rights movements—feminist, environmentalist, anti-racist movements, or, more broadly, movements perceived, rightly or wrongly, as progressive. These observations suggest that the study of reactionary discourse needs to be revised and updated.

Most contemporary studies of reactionary movements have focused on right-wing or ethno-nationalist organisations, for example “the populist right” (Traverso 2019), “the reactionary right”, “national populist movements” (Camus & Lebourg 2017), “far-right 2.0” (Forti 2021), “radical right-wing populist”, “far-right” parties (Mudde 2019; Mudde & Kaltwasser 2013), “right-wing populisms” (Mouffe 2018), and “reactionary populism” (Fraser 2017). This research focuses primarily on the European and the American contexts, but more recently also Latin America (Goldstein 2022, Stefanoni 2022, Bolcatto & Soroujon 2020, Zanotti & Roberts 2021, Morresi, Saferstein & Vicente 2022, Cassimiro & Lynch 2022, Semán 2023, Sanahuja & Stefanoni 2023, Demuru 2024).

However, we observe that for some time now, reactionary discursive formations have spread beyond the far-right, nationalistic rhetoric, and have done so in the form of “discursive nodes” (Krieg-Planque 2010) i.e., tropes availablewithin social discourse. Speakers “pick and choose” individual elements without necessarily adhering to a full reactionary repertoire, thereby generating hybrid discourses. Furthermore, the generalisation of these tropes, detached as they are from their natural environment, are evidence of their acceptability.

The second observation concerns the circulation of this discursive formation across multiple linguistic regions, focusing on transfers between Europe, North America, and Latin America—regions that share common political traditions, yet different democratic cultures, and development markers. This multilingual circulation does not occur as a stable discursive repertoire but rather as ideologemes: underlying units of meaning within statements that belong to the same thematic field (Angenot 1977). For instance, the lexemes wokisme/woke in French and progresismo/zurdo in Spanish are not linguistic equivalents but share the same semantic components in discourse. They refer to the same political imaginary and fulfil the same social function—appropriating concepts from other ideological sectors, delegitimising political opponents, or constructing polarisation in social debates. As these concepts travel between cultural regions, they reflect a normalised anti-progressive imaginary embedded in both classic and innovative forms of reactionary discourse. While there is extensive research on the transnational circulation of political concepts, this conference aims to document the specific moment in social discourse (Angenot 1995) when reactionary discursive formations spread and even become hegemonic across multiple cultural areas. This process highlights the existence of highly flexible political imaginaries capable of adapting to diverse contexts.

This call for communications is situated within two bodies of literature: the study of reactionary rhetoric, initiated by Albert Hirschman (1991; Sternhell 2006; Durand & Syndaco 2015; Shorten 2022; Traverso 2017; Forti 2021; Stefanoni 2022), and the study of the circulation of ideas and concepts (Koselleck 1982, Passard 2024, Skinner 1969).

The conference’s primary goal is to examine the contemporary circulation of reactionary discursive formations (Foucault 1969:141) between Europe and Latin America. The specific objectives are as follows:

• Establish a repertoire of arguments, lexicons, and phraseologies within this discursive formation, whether in national or transnational contexts, focusing on the circulation of specific lexemes (wokisme, cancel culture, batalla cultural, casta).
• Identify paradigms such as the lexical field of totalitarianism (feminazi, ayatollahs de l’écologie, dictature nazitaire, dictadura de la corrección política, terrorismo feminista, ecoterrorismo, feminismo totalitario), hypocrisy and duplicity (gauche caviar, communists, gauchiste, progres), or the conspiratorial imaginary attacking cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and globalization (grand remplacement, agenda 2030).
• Explore interdiscursive relations with other social discourses: leftist discourses, traditional right-wing discourses, human rights rhetoric, scientific or anti-scientific discourses.
• Investigate the social spaces where transfers and circulations occur between different regions (party congresses, media, social networks, publishing houses) and the trajectories of the actors involved.
• Understand the conditions which enable the circulation of these discourses and reactionary imaginaries (the crisis of representative democracy, the role of influencers in radio and social media, media ownership).
• Map the enunciators who carry this discursive formation in terms of their ideological diversity and hybridity (far-right, conservative or liberal right, libertarians, republican universalists).

The conference seeks to examine reactionary discursive formations in both political and everyday discourse, at national and transnational levels, drawing from multiple disciplines: discourse analysis, information and communication sciences, political science, sociology, and the history of ideas. We welcome submission from both national and comparative perspectives, using monolingual or multilingual corpora. Papers can be written in French, English or Spanish.

Submission of proposals

We welcome abstracts of up to 500 words, with bibliographical references at the end. Abstracts can be sent to discoursreac@gmail.com

Deadline: April 28, 2025