From resistance to reconciliation and back again: A semiotic analysis of the Charlie Hebdo cover following the January 2015 events
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Ran Keren
Abstract
The Charlie Hebdo magazine’s 1178 edition was published following the deadly attack against the magazine’s cartoonists on 7 January 2015. The cover portrays the prophet Muhammad holding a sign with the phrase Je Suis Charlie (“I am Charlie”), titled with the phrase tout est pardonne (“all is forgiven”). This paper utilizes two levels of semiotic analyses. The first applies a direct, first level, semiotic reading while the second applies Roland Barthes’ idea of “Myth.” The analyses identify the tension between resistance and reconciliation as a key dialectical axis that drives the interpretive process. Tensions between East-West, religious-secular, natives-immigrants, and Islam-Christianity are all invoked by this cover, generating an extraordinary example of the complexity that cartoons are able to carry out as a form of intertwining semiotic systems. The first level of analysis finds an appropriation of Muhammad’s image in order to deliver messages of reconciliation and solidarity. The second level of analysis – a reading of the cover through Barth’s “Myth” – finds instead a Christian martyr, a Jesus image, replacing Muhammad and functioning as a divisive force that feeds the discourse of cultural clash.
Acknowledgements
This paper would neither have germinated nor ripened without Professor Jorge Capetillo-Ponce’s support, and his keen sense of what is worth digging for, and how to find the right tools to dig! I am also indebted to the translator Marie Giudicelli, who kindly walked me through the French texts of Charlie Hebdo. Finally, this paper has benefited greatly from the insightful and constructive feedback of anonymous Semiotica reviewers.
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Articles in the same Issue
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- The double function of the interpretant in Peirce’s theory of signs
- Integration mechanism and transcendental semiosis
- The communicative wheel: Symptom, signal, and model in multimodal communication
- Discursive representation: Semiotics, theory, and method
- Translation as sign exploration: A semiotic approach based on Peirce
- When does the ritual of mythic symbolic type start and when does it end?
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- Cultural tourism as pilgrimage
- A simple traffic-light semiotic model for tagmemic theory
- From resistance to reconciliation and back again: A semiotic analysis of the Charlie Hebdo cover following the January 2015 events
- Bilingual and intersemiotic representation of distance(s) in Chinese landscape painting: from yi (‘meaning’) to yi (‘freedom’)
- Power-organizing and Ethic-thinking as two paralleled praxes in the historical existence of mankind: A semiotic analysis of their functional segregation
- Semiosic translation
- Construction of new epistemological fields: Interpretation, translation, transmutation
- A biosemiotic reading of Michel Onfray’s Cosmos: Rethinking the essence of communication from an ecocentric and scientific perspective
- Coherence and truthfulness in communication: Intracommunicational and extracommunicational indexicality
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Genome as (hyper)text: From metaphor to theory
- The work of Peirce’s Dicisign in representationalizing early deictic events
- The double function of the interpretant in Peirce’s theory of signs
- Integration mechanism and transcendental semiosis
- The communicative wheel: Symptom, signal, and model in multimodal communication
- Discursive representation: Semiotics, theory, and method
- Translation as sign exploration: A semiotic approach based on Peirce
- When does the ritual of mythic symbolic type start and when does it end?
- Iconoclasms of Emmett Till and his killers in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle: A new generation of historiographic metafiction
- A dialogical semiosis of traveling narratives for self-interpretation: Towards activity-semiotics
- Entre éthologie et sémiotique : Mondes animaux, compétences et accommodation
- A pentadic model of semiotic analysis
- Linguistic violence and the “body to come”: The performativity of hate speech in J. Derrida and J. Butler
- Cultural tourism as pilgrimage
- A simple traffic-light semiotic model for tagmemic theory
- From resistance to reconciliation and back again: A semiotic analysis of the Charlie Hebdo cover following the January 2015 events
- Bilingual and intersemiotic representation of distance(s) in Chinese landscape painting: from yi (‘meaning’) to yi (‘freedom’)
- Power-organizing and Ethic-thinking as two paralleled praxes in the historical existence of mankind: A semiotic analysis of their functional segregation
- Semiosic translation
- Construction of new epistemological fields: Interpretation, translation, transmutation
- A biosemiotic reading of Michel Onfray’s Cosmos: Rethinking the essence of communication from an ecocentric and scientific perspective
- Coherence and truthfulness in communication: Intracommunicational and extracommunicational indexicality
- Poetic logic and sensus communis
- Intrinsic functionality of mathematics, metafunctions in Systemic Functional Semiotics
- Ciudadanos: The myth of neutrality
- Multilingualism and sameness versus otherness in a semiotic context
