“Dionysian Feast” or ‘Holy Supper’?

multimodal polemical dialogism, culture, identity and psychopolitics in the context of the Opening of the Paris 2024 Olympics

Abstract

Based on the multimodal polemical event surrounding the opening scene of the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad of the Modern Era (Paris 2024), we proposed a Dialogical Analysis of Multimodal Argumentation as an epistemological basis and method of analysis (Nascimento, 2018a, 2018b, 2019a, 2019b; Gonçalves-Segundo, 2021). We encountered the modalities of staging, painting, social networks and electronic journalism. To support this, we discuss the relationships between language, culture (Certeau, 2010), identity, difference (Silva, 2012), device (Agamben, 2009) and psychopolitics (Han, 2018) as components of the context of this multimodal polemic. Based on the method of active empathy and Bakhtinian exotopia (Bakhtin, 2020 [1920-24]), we named a right-wing discursive field of sacred identity and, based on this, an opposing left-wing field of profane difference. While the polemical acts of the first field are energized by the immediate emotionalism of psychopolitics, materialized by anger, those of the second are by the objective, universalist and stable rationalism of Social Semiotics. From epistemology and analysis, we can see the important dialogical conception according to which all the worlds of experience (sport, art, language, politics, culture, religion) are not dissociated and are human life itself.