The Rhetoric of Othering in the Greek Parliament: Representations of the Troika and the Self/Other Dichotomy

• Authors: Vilemini Sosoni
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Cornelius Castoriadis (1987: 147) argues that all societies have a central imaginary in order to consider basic questions about their identity. Imaginary specifications provide an answer to these questions, while they assemble, adjust, fabricate and construct a society. In all this, language plays a crucial role. As Castoriadis points out, it is through language that these social imaginary significations become manifest and do their constitutive work. In the spirit of these claims and the assumption that identities are constructed discursively (Tekin 2010: 4), the present article uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to investigate the construction of the identity of the Troika – the common support mechanism for Greece in the wake of its sovereign debt crisis and threat of a disorderly default in 2010 consisting of the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission. The aim is to determine how the different political parties construct the identity of the troika. Since identity necessarily concerns a relation to the Self and the Other, and othering is an important activity in the construction of identity, the paper studies the strategies of othering used in the Greek Parliament by the different political parties across all political affiliations during the parliamentary debate preceding the vote on the second bailout loan on 12 February, 2012. The paper also seeks to identify the social imaginary of Greek society and determine whether it is one of social division and dissimulation or one of unity and accord.

Keywords

EN

identity; political discourse; CDA; social imaginary; self/other dichotomy; Greek financial crisis

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 271-286

Dates

published

2016-03-17

received

2015-07-06

revised

2015-09-04

accepted

2015-12-28

online

2016-03-17

Contributors

author

Vilemini Sosoni

• Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting, Faculty of History and Translation-Interpreting, Ionian University, Megaro Kapodistria, 49100 Corfu, Greece

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/lpp-2015-0014