Linguaggi della guerra

Can we think about war as an object of semiotic analysis? Of course, since it embodies all the problems, the variables and categories that a discipline such as semiotics, in particular sociosemiotics and semiotics of culture, recognizes as fundamental: time and space relationships, actors involved and their ability to plan the action, the relationship between passion, perception and action. The "anomaly" in this case, is that we are studying semiotic systems and practices not only as production, but also as "destruction", in their coding and representational activity. In particular, the link between war and narrative opens up this possibility of investigation. It is in this context that the author thinks about the relationship between strategies and representations, that is, the ways in which the war is "painted" – described, narrated, photographed, filmed. Behind the apparent diversity, we can find the idea of emerging structural models, seen in a comparative way, of fight, conflict and struggle. In an attempt to provide some definitions of war, between anthropology and semiotics, the author insists on the one hand on the glance of semiotics on conflict and, on the other, about the idea – also underlined by Foucault – to observe "forms of war" for showing larger historical, cultural power relationships. More generally, the goal is to consider war inside a given cultural universe, thinking the anthropology of conflict as a part of a larger project of cultural semiotics.