Content uploaded by Rabatel Alain
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Rabatel Alain on Oct 11, 2016
Content may be subject to copyright.
Questions de communication
19 | 2011
Annoncer la mort
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information
Media
Alain Rabatel and Marie-Laure Florea
Translator: Inist
Electronic version
URL: http://
questionsdecommunication.revues.org/8885
DOI: 10.4000/
questionsdecommunication.8885
ISSN: 2259-8901
Publisher
Presses universitaires de Lorraine
Printed version
Date of publication: 30 juin 2011
ISBN: 978-2-8143-0084-2
ISSN: 1633-5961
Electronic reference
Alain Rabatel and Marie-Laure Florea, « Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media »,
Questions de communication [Online], 19 | 2011, Online since 01 February 2014, connection on 03
October 2016. URL : http://questionsdecommunication.revues.org/8885 ; DOI : 10.4000/
questionsdecommunication.8885
This text was automatically generated on 3 octobre 2016.
Tous droits réservés
Re-Presentations of Death in the
Information Media
Alain Rabatel and Marie-Laure Florea
Translation : Inist
EDITOR'S NOTE
This English translation has not been published in printed form/Cette traduction anglaise
n’a pas été publiée sous forme imprimée.
“Show me the manner in which a nation cares for
its dead and I will measure with mathematical
exactness the tender mercies of its people, their
respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty
to high ideals.”
Gladstone
1 Day after day, the dead and death occupy a large part of international news, with the
evocation of the tragedies that strike entire populations (natural disasters, famines,
genocides, wars, and the work of mafiosi and armed gangs laying waste to entire
territories), in the national news, with the deaths of celebrities from the world of the arts,
and more particularly of politics. The “society” page (or even the “other news” page:
inclusion in one section of the newspaper rather than another is in itself full of meaning)
reports on emblematic deaths: suicides demonstrating the malaise of a given category of
the population (employees at Renault’s site at Guyancourt or at France Telecom, and
policemen and prisoners in France, etc); cases linked to the evolution of technology or
mentalities, such as the debate on euthanasia, with a number of heavily mediatised cases
(the death of Vincent Humbert in 2004, the death of Chantal Sébire in 2008, etc). Even the
sports columns cannot escape the occasional mention of deaths, either accidental or as
the result of doping. Nevertheless, despite the omnipresence of death in the press and on
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
1
television, it is not a subject frequently broached by media analysts, as if the taboo
surrounding death reached as far as research circles. It is this gap (albeit relative, as the
following report on current status will show, but significant nevertheless) that the
present two-fold presentation aims to fill (the presentation in issue 20 will cover
“Referring to death”), by taking a multidisciplinary look at contemporary re-
presentations of death in the information media; the presentations will use articles on
information and communication sciences, history, language sciences, and sociology. After
a development of the pertinence of the notion of re-presentation, we shall return to the
paradox of death being both omnipresent in and absent from the media, a fact already
emphasised a number of decades ago, before going on to mention certain philosophical,
psychoanalytical, historical and anthropological explanations of the phenomenon – on
the understanding that issues 19 and 20 will investigate how the paradox has been
maintained or measure its evolution. We shall then look at certain types of discourse on
death in the media, before highlighting a number of areas in connection with the
discursive and semiotic aspects, and presenting the contributions to this presentation,
focused on the announcement of death.
What the notion of re-presentation involves
2 The notion of representation is often criticised in information and communication
sciences because of the little heuristic interest there is in seeking a reflection of events in
discourse (Krieg-Planque, 2006). Such criticism, although justified, by no means exhausts
the debate. The link with which we refer to re-presentation stresses the fact that this
notion should be envisaged as an active process, since initiating discourse is part of the
construction of an event, rather than something passive – since representation is not
simply considered as a more or less faithful image of the event. This concept of re-
presentation stresses the idea that language is not the reflection of a pre-extant reality on
which it has no effect. Physical phenomena exist outside language, but in the order of
social realities, events do not occur regardless of the players and hence of language. As
witness to this, linguistics (and discursive analysis in particular) should not seek to find in
discourse the confirmation of realities or pre-existing knowledge. Indeed such a concept
does not concern linguistics alone: every science which uses written or oral documents
must reach beyond the avatars of reflection; the naïve idea that language is transparent
with regard to its object and with regard to the intentions of the players who act in full
knowledge of what they are or think (they are). Although the role of language in social
relations, as in the construction of objects (whether discursive or scientific) is a
widespread idea, it is often at the price of an underestimation of the specificities of
language, as witnessed by the observations of Bernard Lahire (1996: 124):
“A type of sociology which is equally interested in the processes of the construction
of structural states as in systems, which is equally concerned by knowledge of the
modes of incorporating the social aspect as by the social arrangements that already
exist […] is a type of sociology which is necessarily sensitive to the language
practices that form the fabric of the forms of social relations. Thought and mental
and cognitive structures do not reach the brain by magic. Encouraged by the
acquisitions of Vygotskian psychology, we may therefore underline the importance
of the input of language practices through which relations with the world and with
other people take shape; these can never be dissociated from the balance of power
and relations with the powers that be.”
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
2
3 Bernard Lahire is indeed right to not separate language practices from the other social
practices, and this is also a reason for considering that the social sciences should take
into account the role played by language in the construction of both interpersonal, social
and political relations and cultural and scientific objects. Nevertheless, while linguists are
concerned merely with taking account of the social role of language, they cannot caution
dissolving language in the social – or psychological, cognitive, economic, etc – aspect, not
only because language cannot be reduced to the domination of external factors (of a
social or psychological type), but also because of the underestimation of the fundamental
opacity of language, as strongly highlighted by Jacqueline Authier-Revuz (1995). Yet it is
also these non-coincidences – between words and things, between one person’s words
and those of his/her discourse partners or the interdiscourse – that lay the foundation for
the pertinence of the notion of re-presentation as a mediated construction, and
participate in the construction of thoughts, just as they influence the understanding of
events and, by virtue of that, their course. Yet there is scarcely any mention of this type
of preoccupation in Bernard Lahire (1996). In other words, language is neither the
reflection of pre-existing actions nor an elaborated lingua mentis – the “mentalese” of
cognitivists, as theorised by Jerry Fodor (1975). On the contrary, language constructs
thoughts in the form of discourse, “presenting” them through initial formulations and
“re-presenting” them through processes of resumption, reformulation, paraphrasing and
adjustments of meaning that make it possible to envisage various facets of the discursive
objects, from various points of view, seeking but without ever achieving a reduction in
the non-coincidences. And there is more: the non-coincidences do not concern language
alone; they are also to be found in politics, and in community living. Representations,
which we know do not always agree, raise the question of seeking the best ways to
manage conflicts and devising a modus vivendi. The socio-political dimension of
representation is marked by the lexical aspect of the word “representative” (sales
representatives present and sell the products manufactured by the company that
employs them, and elected representatives represent their voters in the national
representative body, for example). In the complex world in which we live, it is important,
Bruno Latour tells us (2010: 171-172), to find the best ways of making all the variable
social networks discuss matters and not reserve debate for the initiated alone (political or
economic leaders, or scientists), or even for experts alone (which all too often serve only
to legitimate decisions, on the pretext of necessity) by giving the greatest possible
number of representatives and spokespersons the possibility of discussion. In short, in a
truly cosmopolitan world,
“the entire cosmopolitical question then turns into the question of finding the
means of constructing places where these spokespersons can gather and share their
uncertainties on the quality of their representations. This venerable word must be
taken in both senses – that of political philosophy (what is a representative
government?) and that of the philosophy of sciences (what is an exact
representation?) […] Are the representatives legitimate and authorised (whether
they are specialists or politicians)? Are the representations of things and the
matters they debate sufficiently precise? And finally, are there any legitimate
places where they can meet and even perhaps change their opinion about their
utterances?” (ibid.)
4 This political dimension was broached in issue 13 of Questions de Communication (2008),
starting out from the question of collective responsibility. It is not a central feature of all
the articles in the two presentations, but it comes more or less to the fore in the
evocation of conflicts, including in the re-presentations of death, in issue 20. It is worth
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
3
commenting that the input of the constructed character of re-presentations facilitates
questioning the diktat of the evidence which accompanies the naïve conceptions of
representation, in both cognitive and political terms, and in doing so it refers to new
debates, preparing for new decisions and new actions, influencing the course of events.
From this point of view, in linguistic terms and, more broadly, in semiotic terms, re-
presentation, as a new construction, sets a scene that plays on the effects of what is real,
for specific argumentative purposes, such that re-presentation is the trace of the
enunciator’s points of view, even if it takes on the appearance of a re-presentation that
objectivises things. And this construction deserves analysis, including when there is an
attempt to make the representations as accurate as possible. Moreover, the repetition of
the re-presentation, in an identical form or with a few variations, signals that the re-
presentation is more than a way of making sense of something that has been experienced;
it is in fact its re-experiencing. This dimension is fundamentally related to the ritual
function of the evocation of death and the dead person, to facilitate the process of
grieving, as we shall see later.
Dead bodies everywhere – death nowhere?
5 Let us start by taking stock of the matter briefly. According to an expression coined by
Louis-Vincent Thomas (2000: 104), death in the media is everywhere and nowhere,
“obscene and absent from the scene”. Everywhere and nowhere – the phrase deserves
more detail, as it is dead bodies that are everywhere, while death itself is nowhere (i.e.
absent from the scene), and it is indeed the indulgent and voyeuristic images of dead
bodies that are obscene, particularly in the fiction programmes frequently broadcast by
the media. In the information media, however, while dead bodies (and hence “death”, by
metonymy) are omnipresent, there are very few discourses on death or the dead, and
only then in specific sectors of the media. The same is true of photos of people dying, if
only because no cameraman was present at the time. Nevertheless, evolutions in society
and technology (photos and films taken by private individuals using mobile phones) have
altered the situation to some extent. That said, beyond the mere technical possibility,
broadcasting images of people dying comes up against a number of complex ethical
questions: apart from the fact that showing a person dying or a dead body is morally
debatable, “real” death is likely to offend the sensitivity of viewers, unlike death in fiction
programmes. Whatever the case, such images remain relatively rare (if only in
comparison with their frequency in fiction programmes). We should not find this
contradiction surprising, less as a consequence of insufficient philosophical reflection on
the matter than because of the deep fear of experiencing one’s own death that it is likely
to arouse. The presence of death or the dead in the media depends on a certain number of
factors; firstly the nature of the media: television, radio, the written press, and new on-
line media. Periodicity also comes into play: media subject to daily or weekly periodicity
rarely report on happy events (such as trains arriving on time), and their editorial
constraints, focused on events – or indeed anything spectacular -, exert an effect on the
selection and processing of information. On the other hand, as soon as periodicity
exceeds the day or the week, the tyranny of topicality is attenuated, such that the
position of re-presentations of the dead may be relativised in favour of a more reflective
dimension to death or one of its various manifestations. This relativisation depends of
course on the nature of the media, their target publics, and editorial policy choices. There
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
4
is therefore no uniform discourse on death in the media, which are themselves relatively
uniform. This observation, made nearly twenty years ago by Marc Lits (1993), is probably
more topical than ever today. In this work, Frédéric Antoine (1993: 50) emphasised the
extreme disparity between the omnipresence of death and the dead on television and
their rarity on the front page of newspapers, although he stressed the extreme disparities
of treatment between public- and private-sector television channels, between “raw”
death in news items relating violence, with their close-ups, and the “controlled” death of
funerals, which has a “more reassuring character or at the very least is less ‘shocking’ for
television viewers”. The person who is being wept over is in fact the person as he/she was
in life, not the dead person, nor death.
6 Beyond its factual dimension, the research headed by Marc Lits (ibid.: 21) had the merit of
casting light on the complexity of the motivations which contribute to achieving the
mediatised representation of death:
“Apart from the difficulty of accepting the idea of a global, generalising vision of
the media, whereas they differ quite substantially in their handling of fear and
violence, and apart also from a somewhat outdated vision of the political role of the
media as social regulators in the service of the powers that be, it must be admitted
that the media also play with our own desire for fear and violence. The systematic
presentation of events whose common denominator is violence and death is not
solely due to the necrophiliac obsessions of blood-thirsty journalists, nor is it due to
a prophylactic concern on the part of newspaper editors for the wellbeing of the
general public; there is no doubt that it responds to subconscious expectations on
the part of the readership.”
7 This complexity makes it impossible to fall into the facile approach of either incantations
unilaterally calling into question a voyeuristic, thrill-seeking public, or unscrupulous
media only interested in boosting audience figures (ibid.: 26). There is a fundamental
paradox here, and it would be helpful to ascertain the current tensions between an
omnipresence of death and its “de-realising” re-presentation, to use the expression
coined by Louis-Vincent Thomas (1991a: 27), in as much as focusing on accidental, violent
deaths is in fact a convenient way of envisaging a type of death “which may be avoided
and which remains very largely in a minority in statistical terms”. Does this analysis also
hold true for the re-presentation of major human dramas and their cortège of bodies? Are
the stagings of these collective dramas, in which chance and accident are of little
importance, just as de-realising as the “raw” deaths of other news items? We may
apparently reply in the affirmative, if we relate them to the individual experience of
death. In this sense, the stagings of “anecdotal death” fall within the scope of Pascalian
entertainment (Thomas, 1991a: 42-43; 1991b: 810-811), with its “reassuring chatter”
(Thomas, 1991a: 27), “as if the televised discourse on death could only affirm itself on the
screen, out of step with the reality of the experience”:
“The televised image of dead bodies, the medicine of post-modern times, takes on
an anxiolytic function – the daily sacrifice of one or two human beings on the altar
of the television news enabling all viewers, in the comfort of their own homes, to
accept death as an inevitable general phenomenon, and at the same time refute
their own death.” (Antoine, 1993: 64)
8 The purpose of this presentation is therefore, inter alia, to measure the evolutions that
have occurred since these analyses were made, whereas profound changes have left their
mark, both in the organisation of the social, cultural and affective life of our societies,
and the modi operandi of the media. In the light of these changes, are there any
comparable adjustments in the re-presentation of death and dead bodies? If so, in what
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
5
areas, in what ways, and with what direction and meaning? And also, what significance
should we allow the possible lack of change?
The background to representations of death in the
media
9 In this perspective, it would appear essential to return to some famous work that ought to
be referred to in questioning media practices. Re-presentations of death in the media are
in fact inseparable from the philosophical, anthropological and historical setting in which
they exist.
Philosophical background
10 In La Mort [‘death’] (1977), Vladimir Jankélévitch distinguishes three temporalities which
shape an evolutive relationship with death. Firstly, there is “death this side of death”, the
death we meditate on and prepare, and which is not death; it is death in such an abstract
form that we may think we are able to escape it, since no-one knows the place or date of
his/her death. The elderly do not achieve such knowledge: even though the date
approaches, it still remains uncertain (mors certa, hora incerta). In fact, it is only the
prisoner facing a death sentence and the potential suicide who know when it is to be.
Within this first experience of death this side of death, there are three successive
scansions: the first considers it as an abstract eventuality (this is the state of mortalis), the
second envisages a probable death that is approaching (moriturus), and the third is
imminent death (moribundus). After “death this side of death” comes “death in the mortal
instant”, an irreversible, irrevocable phenomenon by which we die and immediately
become absent to ourselves: “Thus the living experience their death in a unique instant,
and immediately die: death can only be experienced by dying forthwith! We experience it
by dying, and we are dying to experience it” (Jankélévitch, 1977: 351). It is by an abuse of
language that the second type of relationship with death is an experience in terms of
time, since its occurrence is the sign of our demise: “Death cannot be learned. There is
nothing to learn. To begin with, it is a thing one does only once in one’s life, and that first
time is also the last, by definition” (ibid.: 34). “Death as a mediatised death” is the death
that is apprehended in an eschatological form, making way for meditation on the
afterlife, with all its anxieties and its hopes. But it takes us further away from the field of
the intimate, physical experience of death, towards a more reflective apprehension.
These three temporalities are related to the three separate modes of apprehending death.
Thus there exists what Jankélévitch happily calls “death in the third person”: this is
“death in general, abstract and anonymous death, clean death, in as much as it is viewed
impersonally and conceptually” (ibid.: 25). This death in the third person of course
concerns other people, but it also concerns the subject who, to paraphrase Jacques
Madaule, knows he/she is going to die, but does not believe it will happen. That is why
this method of apprehension concerns both “death before death” and “death as a
mediatised death”. The second mode of apprehending death is “death in the second
person”, i.e. the death of a friend or relative, which is the way in which distant death
comes to affect us in the sphere of otherness that is closest to us: “‘You’ represents the
first ‘Other Person’, the immediately other ‘other person’ and the ‘not-me’ at its point of
contact with the ‘me’, the closest limit difference can have” (ibid.: 29). Lastly, there is
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
6
“death in the first person”, always seen as a future event, a mystery that remains
inaccessible for the subject, since when death occurs in the mortal instant, the person
dies: “I am in fact always, and indeed by definition, before my own death; the periods
during, and a fortiori after, that moment, are obstinately withheld from me” (ibid.: 32).
This death in the first person is a mystery from which we cannot escape, and indeed
human beings attempt to keep it at a distance, sensing that there is some “problem”:
“Mea res agitur! My affairs are at issue” (ibid.: 26).
11 It is worth considering which temporalities and which mode of envisaging death are
generally reported in the media. The information media devote a huge amount of space to
death in the third person. Death in the second person is fast becoming more common:
whereas previously it was limited to certain specific genres (such as death
announcements and obituary notices), the use of the new technologies and evolution in
customs (which enable anyone to occupy the role of a journalist, thereby turning the
players in an event into the authors of information on that event) open up new
perspectives: thus for example a young mother kept a blog of the life and death of her
daughter Faith, suffering from anencephaly (and consequently destined for a rapid death)
1. As for death in the first person, it has little place in the information media, although
even there the new media are bringing in substantial changes: thus for example the
young English television celebrity Jade Goody, suffering from cancer, invited the cameras
into her home for the final few months of her life in order to make enough money to
leave to support her children2. The cameras did not film her final days, but that will
happen soon enough, if in fact it has not already been done, in a concealed, confidential
manner. In the same way, an increasing number of suicides are, if not actually filmed
(which happens, but is quickly censored), at least announced live on the Internet.
Whatever the event, it is rather in the field of fiction that death occurs in the first and
second persons (not excluding death in the third person), whereas in the information
press the opposite choice is adopted. This being so, we need to move beyond this first
observation, and it is one of the aims of these issues to check specifically how evocations
of death (in the first, second or third person) handle the subject – from a distance or not,
using pathos or not, using sensationalism or not – and to analyse how they include
emotion and reflection, etc. In the same way, we need to see to what extent the various
information media devote space to the different temporalities of the relationship with
death, and in particular if it has been possible to observe any evolution, more specifically
in the electronic media which are currently overturning media practices.
Psychoanalytical background
12 We shall not develop here work that is well known and readily accessible; we shall limit
ourselves to focusing on the bridges between this work and the other scientific paradigms
referred to in this section. Life and death impulses are closely interconnected, although
in variable ways. Both Eros and Thanatos are the subject of generalised taboos, in one
form or another. This is what is shown by the work that recounts long-term historical
evolution. Indeed it appears that the taboo regarding death is stronger than the taboo
regarding sexuality (see Didier, 1988: 127; Ariès, 1977: 574). For several decades past, our
era – apparently, at least, although such appearance has meaning – has held a relatively
liberated discourse on sex and sexuality, whereas it is as if death has been banned. Jean
Baudrillard (1976: 279) puts this evolution into perspective when he says that:
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
7
“talking about death provokes laughter, albeit tense and obscene laughter. Talking
about sex no longer causes the same reaction: sex is legal; it is death that is
pornographic3. By ‘liberating’ sexuality, society has gradually replaced it by death,
which has become a secret rite and a fundamental interdict. In an earlier – religious
- phase, death was in the open and recognised, while sexuality was hidden away.
The opposite is now true.”
13 This reversal mentioned by Jean Baudrillard invites us to take a closer look at what has
happened in historical terms, even if there are also repercussions in psychoanalytical and
political terms, through the profiling of a mono-dimensional Eros who enslaves
individuals to a new form of merchandisation, that of desire, or at the very least to a
merchandised desire (ibid.: 280). Thus, in developed societies since the mid-20th century,
death has become the subject of real “exclusion” (Ariès, 1977: 573-574) regarding not only
dead bodies but also the expression of the grief of bereavement, which is increasingly
limited to the private sphere, as if death were contagious, as if mentioning it constituted
relenting to a morbid impulse. Nor will readers be surprised that psychologists and
psychoanalysts criticise these trends and issue warnings that it is actually the mechanism
of excluding death which is morbid, both for individuals and for societies. Hence the
attempts in recent decades to consider, in one form or another, the return of what has
been repressed. This is particularly the case in the pioneering work carried out by
Élisabeth Kübler-Ross (1969) in giving back their dignity to ill people and the dying,
allowing suffering and death to have their place – that is the framework in which the
work on euthanasia needs to be considered, the total opposite of work being carried out
on eugenics. The medicalisation of death has by no means abolished the fear of death, and
patients bristling with tubes and probes present a modern (and expensive) form of our
anxieties that is just as terrifying as a medieval danse macabre.
Historical background
14 The scandal of death also runs through the historicised (and European or western
centrist) representations of death. In L’Homme devant la mort [published in English as The
Hour of our Death], Philippe Ariès (1977: 596-608) distinguished four historical periods
which mark evolutions in the historicised relationship of humanity with death according
to four fundamental parameters: self-awareness, the defence of society from untamed
nature, belief in survival, and belief in the existence of evil:
•Prior to the 11th century, “death for all” was “tamed death”: death was public, accepted, and
controlled. It corresponded to the Christian model in which the deceased are familiars, in
which dying does not interrupt the continuity of being. In this respect, tamed death differs
from the familiar death of ancient history, which feared death and set up necropolises
outside its towns. It was not until the 5th century that the dead were allowed inside towns, in
and around churches, in connection with the cult of martyrs and faith in the resurrection of
the dead (ibid.: 55).
•From the 11th to the end of the 17th century, “death of self”: death became personalised, life
and the singularity of existence were more affirmed, burials became individual, with chapels
for nobles, before becoming more democratised by the use of burial tombs (ibid.: 287). Dead
bodies were increasingly hidden away – the coffin was quickly closed, covered with a pall,
and even for important people, topped with a “representation”, the name given to a
funerary effigy of the dead person in wood or wax (ibid.: 168-170). The practise of making a
will began to spread, connected with the increase in the importance of the nuclear family.
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
8
•From the 19th to the 20th century, “death of you” corresponded to the Romantic period,
during which the death of the beloved was experienced as a theatralised tearing away,
although it also included faith in being reunited after death (ibid.: 604-605).
•Since approximately the middle of the 20th century, with “inversed death” or “forbidden
death”, death has become medicalised and professionalised, with the intervention of other
people who are supposed to help achieve a gentle death.
15 These evolutions have not, however, followed a straight line of development. After the
triumph of medieval Christian death, Michel Vovelle (1974) emphasises the emergence of
a new type of sensitivity with the Renaissance, when plagues and the macabre became
less important, and there was a three-fold contestation – religious (Protestantism did
away with purgatory in the afterlife), humanist (concern for a good life on a day-to-day
basis limits thinking about death), and popular (hell was mocked). Thus the period from
1580 to 1730, which corresponds to the Baroque period, features “gaining a stranglehold
over death”. In the 19th century, the bourgeoisie “colonised death to its advantage”, while
the priest was upstaged by the doctor, and family grief and bereavement blossomed in
the graveyard. Every form of belief coexisted at that time – the certitude of eternal life, a
total lack of belief, religious or philosophical thoughts of death, religious or political
hope, etc (Vovelle, 1974; 1983). It must also be borne in mind that these evolutions have
their own geography: thus “inversed death”, which developed strongly in the USA and
England in the 20th century, met with varying degrees of resistance on the European
continent; similarly, death was hidden away more radically in Catholic and Protestant
Europe than in Orthodox Europe (see Ariès, 1977: 169-170; 587-588). In addition, although
the periodisation of Philippe Ariès does not overlap the philosophical typologies of
Vladimir Jankélévitch – despite being inspired by them – it does have the merit of
recalling that the ground from which they emerged cannot escape from a long duration
which, if it is taken into account, relativises the importance of the analyses that are
excessively centred on a European experience and moreover, on a very recent experience
of no more than a few centuries. As a result it is (or would be) wrong to fail to admit the
significant trends of anthropology, namely the fact that death is always “prowling and
repressed, although omnipresent in the media, sudden and often violent in wars,
accidents, and disasters, or slow in the case of protracted illness, death or coma, or
institutionalised and bureaucratic, or – increasingly – medicalised and merchandised”
(Thomas, 1991b: 822-823; Hintermeyer, 2003), or increasingly individualised (Elias, 1982).
Thus it transpires that the anthropological approach, which underpins the historical
work, forms a fundamental backdrop for measuring the re-presentations of death in the
information media, and that it must be taken into account, including in order to measure
the precise significance of the historical evolutions of the re-presentations of death.
Anthropological background
16 While death is omnipresent in the media, the fact remains that, in our developed
societies, with the lengthening of life expectancy and the shrinking of families to the
nuclear family, the opportunities for personal contact with death are rare. It has been
calculated, for example, that in the United States a person could live for 20 years without
anyone in his/her entourage dying. The same cannot be said of Africa or India, of course.
In short, the (relative) disappearance of death – which may be accompanied by its
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
9
“demystification” and its desacralisation – does not prevent it remaining a taboo or a
scandal (Thomas, 1991b: 836).
17 It still needs to be said that the relationship to death just mentioned corresponds to the
conceptions of western societies (on which we shall concentrate in this presentation with
regard to the media aspect) and which is far from being shared by other cultures, as
demonstrated more particularly in Louis-Vincent Thomas’s work on Africa. And in fact
within those western societies the relationship with death is not uniform. Thus the work
of Tony Walter (1994) points to a revival of mortuary practices in the English-speaking
world that seems to question the analyses of Philippe Ariès and Louis-Vincent Thomas
(more particularly), in as much as this revival may be based on the refusal to deny death.
Indeed does the good death referred to by Tony Walter – a death that is chosen, prepared,
and controlled, and experienced by the dying person with the people close to him/her
(family or community) or with accompaniers (death professionals) in close contact with
him/her, mean, as the author says, the end of the denial of death? We are entitled to
wonder whether this claim to take control of the process right up to the end is not itself a
supreme form of denial, by the illusory affirmation of total power on the part of the
individual and the group around him/her. As to the fact that this revival marks a desire to
break with the rituals of times past, once again it is not a self-evidence, since the private
experience of such neo-modern death affects only a relatively small part of the
population. We do not have enough distance to be able to say whether these practices
replace rituals in general; it is true that rituals may evolve, but the need for rituals
appears to be an anthropological constant in human societies. Indeed Tony Walter
himself, in the conclusion of his work, wonders about the scope of these evolutions (see
also Déchaux, 1996). The fact nevertheless remains that, in every society, representations
of good and bad death coexist: whatever their differences, African societies (which tend
to be animist) and Western (rather more Christian) societies converge on the idea that a
good death on one which occurs as late in life as possible, respects one’s dignity, involves
dying surrounded by one’s family and friends, in one’s own country, with one’s affairs in
order (Thomas, 1991b: 823-827). and it is probably not unreasonable to consider the
multiplication of treatments devoted to approaching death as a faint echo of the anxieties
it arouses, feeding the persistence of the taboo, or the illusion that it is possible to escape
its occurrence…
The discourse on death and the dead in the media
18 These days, the genres that deal directly with death in the media focus more on the
announcement of death than on its evocation, which is scattered through other non-
specific sections of the newspaper4.
From past genres to contemporary genres
19 Among the discursive genres (Adam, Herman, Lugrin, 2000) in the media – except literary
genres (see on this point Ernst, 1983; 1988) − that are reserved for death or people who
have died, well before the obituary notice, came first the lamentation, then the eulogy,
and the funeral oration. There are also epitaphs (Ariès, 1977: 214-227; Simonin, 1988;
Urbain, 1989), and wills – a genre that in certain eras became a literary genre (see Ariès,
1977: 188-197; Favre, 1988). These genres are not to be found in the media, however,
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
10
except for reasons extrinsic to the death issue, for example the need to pad out columns
on culture or other news items; in general, however, nowadays they fall within the
private sphere. The reproduction may possibly involve highly specialised, professional or
partisan media: this corresponds to a private sphere extended to a community. It is
indeed highly unusual for such discourses to reach the major national media, except in
specific areas and in highly codified situations, such as the speech delivered by a new
member of the Académie Française on being installed, which contains a eulogy of the
previous occupant of the seat henceforth occupied by the new member, which is
published in Le Monde and in the literary supplement of Le Figaro. In short, these genres
are seriously constrained by contextual data: the private sphere is deemed more
important than earlier types of sociability, only a small number of people are likely to be
involved in such use, the narrowness and confidentiality of circulation, etc.
The case of the obituary notice
20 In the contemporary period, the most abundant genre is that of the obituary. Its history is
recent: in 1835, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française devoted an article to obituary
notices for the first time, defining them as “certain short writings devoted to the memory
of notable people who have recently passed away”. In 2007, the Petit Robert dictionary
defined the obituary notice as a “biographical notice concerning a person who has
recently died”. Comparison of these two definitions reflects the stability of this type of
discourse over the past two centuries of existence. Etymologically, “obituary” refers to
that fact that someone has died; actually, the obituary has inherited the centuries-old
tradition of the eulogy, which consists of speaking in elogious terms about a person who
has died and which, depending on time and place, has manifested itself in the past as the
elogium (in Ancient Rome), the funeral oration (in a religious context), or in the manifesto
mortuario (the notices liberally posted up in the streets of Mediterranean countries when
someone dies). Thus death has always been an occasion for an upsurge of utterance,
intended to overcome grief, to maintain the memory of the deceased, or to gather
together those who are left: in that, the obituary is one of the rites in modern-day
bereavement in the western world and in the staging of the fundamental values of a
society (Dominicy, Frédéric, 2001). Throughout the 19th century, newspapers published
obituaries in the form of texts written by journalists which retraced the biography of
relatively well-known persons who had died. However, it took some time for these texts
to acquire a place of their own in the newspaper columns: they appeared irregularly, in
variable places in the newspaper, ranging from the main news section to the section on
“other news items”. The end of the 19th century saw the appearance of true obituary
columns with a fixed location in the newspaper, in the form in which we know them
today (Makarova, 2003). Since then, the obituaries column has stabilised and is now
among the well-established practices of journalism. Nowadays, newspapers have a
regular column for obituaries, generally on the “society” pages; even if the word
“obituary” is not used, the title of the column is often explicit. Thus the obituaries in Le
Monde and Le Figaro (the two main suppliers of obituaries in the French national press) are
to be found under the respective headings of “Disappearances” and “Bereavement”. In
this respect, it should be noted that the taboo surrounding death prevents the use of the
word “obituary” in newspaper columns: even though the obituaries themselves refer
explicitly to death, euphemisms are usually preferred for headings, rather than coarser
terms. The wording of obituaries has become extremely codified: after a short paragraph
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
11
intended to announce the death (and sometimes the circumstances of its occurrence:
date, place, cause, etc), the article usually oscillates between a record of the deceased
person’s life and a more or less effusive tribute. The length of the obituary is variable; it
may be anywhere between a short notice to a two-page spread, depending on the
celebrity of the person who has died (Revaz, 2000; Florea, 2010).
Death announcements
21 Unlike the differences between the variations affecting the obituary genre, the death
announcements genre appears to be more firmly constrained by its dimensions and by
the medium used. These announcements of deaths that have occurred are composed by
people close to the deceased; their circulation, for which payment must be made, obeys
relatively fixed routines, determined in part by the newspapers, which impose certain
editorial standards, but also by custom, which requires certain practices, particularly
regarding the wording used or the use of images in the announcements (Hammer, 2010).
The genre nevertheless presents a number of specific features and significant sub-genres
regarding the discourse re-presenting death and the dead (Ringlet, 1993: 73-74; Bertrand,
1995). The genre does not escape evolution in society, which it reflects and accompanies
(Ringlet, 1992, 1993), as we shall see in this presentation.
Some of the issues involved in the discursive and
multi-semiotic representation of death and the dead in
the media
Essential questions
22 The issue of discourses on death and the dead cannot, however, be limited to the study of
obituaries and death announcements, although this is of capital importance. It also
concerns the discourses which, although not belonging specifically to a genre of discourse
on death within the preceding meaning, are nevertheless at pains to consider the fact of
death, and to include it in a much broader chain of events. In this sense, mediatised
discourses provide a means of investigating a certain number of essential questions, or,
on occasions, point to the difficulty of dealing with them head-on. These include the
debate on euthanasia, on the relationship between suicide and work, on any particular
genocide – e.g. the Armenian genocide, the extermination of Jews and gypsies during the
Nazi period (Thanassekos, 2007) −, on famines, or on any particular conflict − for
example the Balkan conflicts with their ethnic cleansing (Krieg-Planque, 2003), Rwanda
(Halen, Walter, 2008; Fleury, Walter, 2008) – or the work of art critics on works featuring
death. At any event, they question the responsibility of journalism, by its choices and by
its silences, and, beyond that, the responsibility of the social body and it intermediary
bodies (Rabatel, Chauvin, 2006; Rabatel, Koren, 2008, Rabatel, 2008). These issues are most
frequently broached by evoking the issues death raises.
Ineffability?
23 There is a “thesis” (if it is not actually a commonplace it is at the very least an
unfortunate short-cut) according to which if death cannot be represented or spoken of, it
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
12
only owes its ineffability to the fact that death is a unknowable challenge that generates
anxiety and taboos (Thomas, 2000: 105-106). Without claiming in any way to deny the
reality of this, we note nevertheless that this concerns death in the first person more
than any other form, except, of course, that they may be applied to one’s own anxieties. It
is in relation to this that Louis-Vincent Thomas (ibid.: 60, 221) mentions various forms of
ineffability: thus he lists the lexical processes of euphemisation, tabooisation, silence,
paraphrase and circumlocution. These may adopt either a symbolic register (“he passed
away”) or a vulgar register (“he kicked the bucket”), confirming “the evident role of slang
expressions with a cathartic function” (Thomas, 1991b: 805). Lastly, he recalls that
although there are three of four synonyms for the verb “to live” in French, there are
more than thirty for the verb “to die”, not counting paraphrases (Thomas, 1991b: 838). In
terms of discursive cover-ups5 that may be based on ellipsis or on “dilution through
rhetoric” (ibid.: 221-222), it is customary to accord great importance to narratives, as does
Vladimir Jankélévitch, since, as this side of death and the afterlife cannot be included in
the discourse, there is scarcely anything left apart from “the narrative of this side of
death, which is biography, and the romance of the afterlife, which is a fantasy tale” (ibid.).
This type of cover-up also includes apophatic inversions which attempt to speak of death
by referring to that which it is not – on the supposition that death is contrary or
contradictory to life. Yet reference to ineffability constitutes oversimplification and
opacifies the issue if we do not state to which set of phenomena we refer. There is indeed
a mental, psychological and cultu(r)al phenomenon which reveals the difficulty of saying,
or things which may not be said. For the linguist, however, what can be said is said, and
what is said is always significant. Of course, it is not the same thing to speak directly or
indirectly, in any given register; the way of making references and their organisation in
the phrase and in the discourse are significant. In linguistic terms, then, ineffability has
no pertinence. The same also applies for pictorial re-presentations of death and dead
bodies: although they sometimes circumvent the raw representation of death, they do not
show it any less, but use strategies that need to be described.
The role of narrative in representations of death
24 What is more, interpreting narrative as having the sole function of covering up by default
or by excess constitutes an oversimplification, as does permitting the idea that narrative
is the sole or preferred form of evoking death. These two points need to be made. It is
true that narrative is part of the construction of the identity of social groups. It is also
true that the media have taken over from, but not totally supplanted, myths, tales,
legends, and literary texts. The pervasiveness of re-presentations of death/the dead (in
the written press and on television) speaks of the world and institutes our vision of what
is real by telling us its story. This is all so strong that, by an abusive generalisation, we
sometimes go so far as to extend the outlines of narrative identity, which is very real in
its own sphere, whereas identity is necessarily constructed through narratives, renamed
“major narratives” for the occasion. In this respect, the fashion for storytelling (Salmon,
2007) in the media seems to correspond to a simplification (and not only in the media, but
also in theory), since narrative cannot in any way constitute the beginning and end of the
construction of identity. It must therefore be recalled that identity goes beyond the issue
of narrative identity (Ricœur, 1983; Charaudeau, 1997). As Jean-Marc Ferry emphasises
(1991: 112), alongside the founding role of narration, which is the prime mode for the
construction of identity, other registers are also involved. Thus interpretation intervenes
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
13
“as soon as narrative is understood in a perspective of edification”, when thinking
extends beyond the contingent framework of the action in order to explain what it is. The
author continues with an explanation of a third stage, argumentation, which he defines
as an effort to think through the specific phenomena and their explanation using
different forms of logic, directed towards reactions for action that are valid for everyone,
not only for those who have been the originators or witnesses of such an event which has
been retold and then interpreted. That is why the argumentation is itself apprehended on
the basis of the necessities of a fourth movement which completes the dynamic of the
construction of identities that Jean-Marc Ferry calls “reconstruction”, aimed at justifying
the argumentation by taking other good reasons into account, situating and
contextualising them in order to avoid any intolerant ideological drift, although without
any tinge of relativism. It is indeed all these levels taken together which interact in the
emotional and rational construction of identities, centred of action, itself charged with
emotion and reason. The dynamic of the categories drawn up by Jean-Marc Ferry is
valuable in considering the multiplicity of the angles the information media adopt in
announcing and evoking death, and – above all – the entanglement of the language-
related and cognitive phenomena surrounding these re-presentations which not only are
able to play on the emotions and empathy, but also strive to consider rationally the issues
involved in death and its re-presentations. Thus the obituary columns, the articles
devoted to some genocide or other, or to a given problem in society not only recount
dramatic events, but also place them in perspective, analyse them, and sometimes even
attempt to envisage possible solutions; certainly not death as an unavoidable process, but
death as a scandal demonstrating tragedy that it might be thought possible or desirable
to prevent. We can see that in the light of the preceding analyses, the evocation of death
and the dead in narratives is more complex than stated by Vladimir Jankélévitch and
Louis-Vincent Thomas and that, in fact, the narrative needs to be articulated with other
modes of representation, with argument and interpretation playing their role in the
philosophical and anthropological apprehension of death and the dead.
Announcing death
25 The texts included in the 19th and 20th issues of Questions de Communication will deal with
the question of the re-presentation of death by describing, in issue 19, the way death is
re-presented in the information media (Announcing death), and by presenting, in issue 20,
the issues involved in re-presenting death in the information media (Referring to death).
The two presentations together, of course, although in different proportions, deal with
the forms of re-presentation and the issues they raise. In most cases, “announcing death”
means announcing an individual death rather than collective or mass deaths. It is also a
celebration of the dead person – and, as we shall see, a celebration of the person he/she
was in life, a life that continues through shared values. In other words, announcing death
is one of the rituals of death, and it is from this starting-point of the notion of ritual that
we shall attempt to consider its discursive and (tele)visual re-presentation. On the other
hand, referring to death using involves treating death as a sign of something, accusatory
death, interrogatory death, in short, death for a reason, death as a preventive. The evocative
dimension becomes analytical and praxis-oriented, referring to political dramas and
social crises for which solutions need to be sought in order to reduce the number of
deaths. It is true that this dimension is also found in announcing death, but evocation in
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
14
the latter case is more emotionally loaded, in as much as the announcement is often made
by speakers with a degree of proximity to the deceased person and there are constraints
of a generic nature.
26 This presentation seeks to determine how a dead person (or death, or even perhaps the
living person) is uttered and displayed in the information media. Its subdivision takes
account of the types of media, in order to check whether death is uttered in the same way
on television as in the written press, if the new on-line media have given rise to new,
more personal, more immediate, ways of speaking about death. Above all, the aim of this
issue is to question these modes of re-presentation in order to see if they constitute a
means of continuing if not the forms of the rituals then at least their immemorial
functions, by which words, like gestures – not forgetting that in this case words are
discursive gestures – reflect the commitment on the part of those who accompany the
dead person, in order to put words to the emotions being felt, to allow separation from
the dead person, and to allow grieving to take its course. In short, it is a matter of seeing
what forms the living use both to pay tribute to a person who has died and at the same
time to facilitate the return to the land of the living, since life must go on.
27 The presentation is broken down into three sub-sections: the first is devoted to an
analysis of obituary columns and announcements of deaths in the written press over the
last decade. The second is concerned with new commemorative rituals on the Internet.
The third deals with the evolution in the televised funeral in France since its origins.
Marie-Laure Florea shows that in obituaries the re-presentation of death is staged in such
a way that it marks the division between the living and the deceased at the same time
that the dead person is re-presented, in the sense that he/she is brought back into the
present through the discourse. In this way, obituary columns fulfil a ritual function
inasmuch as evoking the deceased allows not only the process of bereavement to take its
course, but also arouses community spirit focusing on the values that the dead person
embodied more particularly, and which prove to be essential to the permanence of
society or of more restricted communities. Françoise Hammer highlights the strategies
for circumventing the taboo of death in the announcements of deaths published in the
regional press. Beyond the primary pragmatic function of announcing the death and the
date of the funeral, it also demonstrates four discursive strategies – distancing,
convocation, invocation, and appropriation of death.
28 The two subsequent articles analyse new writing practices, which are new modes of
sociability that focus on announcements and eulogies on the Internet. Adeline Wrona
takes a look at the “jesuismort.com” [“I_am_dead”] Internet site, which reworks the
forms of the post mortem eulogy by hybridising models inherited with the potentialities
specific to writings on a screen. Discourse concerning the dead determines
communicational gestures (provided by the site) that give meaning to the tribute and
constitute so many new forms of participation in a funerary ritual examined from the
viewpoint of its temporal scheme, its economic model, and its modes of sociability. Sophie
Pène studies three phenomena connected with the functioning of the Facebook social
network: announcements, discussions concerning the continuation of a page belonging to
someone who has died, and commemoration of deaths connected with a dramatic event
(disaster, crime, illness, etc): memorials demonstrate the affective and symbolic issues at
work in these places of digital socialisation, and at the same time question their future.
29 Benoît Lafon analyses the long-term ceremonial dimension of televised funerals, from the
beginnings of television in France. The collective experience of live coverage of funerals
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
15
has varied in the way the dead are projected and the living are involved, by causing an
evolution in the representations towards civilian tributes and renewed figureheads.
These evolutions, in relation to characters who are not in the close circle of family and
friends, reflect new methods of neutralising death, based on intersubjectivity, replacing
traditional behaviour. In doing so, televised funerals are an indication of the perpetuation
in constantly renewed forms of “formalisations” and “reformalisations” (Elias, 1982) of a
relationship with death, through the intermediary of the production of figureheads.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adam J.-M., Herman T., Lugrin G., dirs., 2000, « Genres de la presse écrite et analyse de discours »,
Semen, 13.
Antoine F., 1993, « Mourir au JT. Les cadavres exquis de l’information télévisée », pp. 45-64, in :
Lits M., dir., La peur, la mort et les médias, Bruxelles, Éd. Vie ouvrière.
Ariès Ph., 1975, Essai sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen Âge à nos jours, Paris, Éd. Le Seuil.
— 1977, L’Homme devant la mort, Paris, Éd. Le Seuil.
Authier-Revuz J., 1995, Ces mots qui ne vont pas de soi, Paris, Larousse.
Baudrillard J., 1976, L’échange symbolique et la mort, Paris, Gallimard.
Bertrand Y., 1995, « Les faire-part de décès dans la presse allemande », Nouveaux cahiers
d’allemand, vol. 13-4, pp. 389-399.
Charaudeau P., 1997, Le discours d’information médiatique. La construction du miroir social, Paris,
Nathan.
Châtelet N., 2004, La dernière leçon. Paris, Éd. Le Seuil.
Danblon E., 2001, « La rationalité du discours épidictique », pp. 19-47, in : Dominicy M., Frédéric
M., dirs, La mise en scène des valeurs. La rhétorique de l’éloge et du blâme, Paris, Delachaux et Niestlé.
Déchaux J.-H., 1996, « Walter (Tony). The revival of death », Revue française de sociologie, 37,
pp. 161-164.
Delporte C., dir., 2003, « Interdits. Tabous, transgressions, censures », Le temps des médias, 1.
Didier B., 1988, « Le journal intime : écriture de la mort ou vie de l’écriture », pp. 127-147, in :
Ernst G., dir., La mort dans le texte, Lyon, Presses universitaires de Lyon.
Di Folco P., dir., 2010, Dictionnaire de la Mort, Paris, Larousse.
Dominicy M., Frédéric M., dirs., 2001, La mise en scène des valeurs. La rhétorique de l’éloge et du blâme,
Paris, Delachaux et Niestlé.
Dubied A., Lits M., 1999, Le fait divers, Paris, Presses universitaires de France.
Elias N., 1982, La solitude des mourants, trad. de l’allemand par S. Muller Paris, Christian Bourgois,
1998.
Ernst G., dir., 1983, La mort en toutes lettres, Nancy, Presses universitaires de Nancy.
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
16
1988, La mort dans le texte, Lyon, Presses universitaires de Lyon.
Favre M., 1998, « La mort-caution : l’écriture testamentaire », pp. 103-110, in : Ernst G., dir., La
mort dans le texte, Lyon, Presses universitaires de Lyon.
Ferry J.-M., 1991, Les puissances de l’expérience. Essai sur l’identité contemporaine, Paris, Éd. Le Cerf.
Fleury B., Walter J., dirs., 2008, Qualifier, disqualifier, requalifier des lieux de détention, de concentration
et d’extermination, Nancy, Presses universitaires de Nancy.
Florea M.-L., 2010a, « Nécrologies », pp. 735-737, in : Di Folco P., dir., Dictionnaire de la Mort, Paris,
Larousse.
— 2010b, « Interpeller l’absent : le rôle de la convocation du disparu dans les nécrologies », in :
Torterat F., Thibaut, A., dirs., Corela, L’interpellation. Accès : http://corela.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/
index.php?id=743.
— 2010c, « Portrait d’autrui et image de soi : l’éthos dans la nécrologie de presse », pp. 63-72, in :
Actes du XXVe Congrès international de linguistique et de philologie romanes, T. V, Berlin, De Gruyter.
Fodor J., 1975, The Language of Thought, New York, Crowell.
Freud S., 1931, L’inquiétante étrangeté et autres essais, trad. de l’allemand par B. Féron Paris,
Gallimard.
Gorer G., 1955, « Pornography of Death », Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain,
London, Cresset Press, pp. 169-175.
Halbur B., Vandagriff M., 1987, « Societal responses after death: a study of sex differences in
Newspaper death notices for Birmingham, Alabama, 1900-1985 », Sex Roles, 17/7-8, pp. 421-436.
Halen P., Walter J., dirs, 2008, Les langages de la mémoire. Littérature, médias, et génocide au Rwanda,
Metz, Publications de l’université Paul Verlaine.
Hammer F., 2010, « Interpellativité et appellativité. Une étude pragmatique de l’avis de décès », in
: Torterat F., Thibaut, A., dirs, Corela, L’interpellation. Accès : http://corela.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/
index.php?id=754.
Haneman B., 2001, « On the writing and reading of obituaries », Medical journal of Australia, 17-1,
pp. 59-60.
Hanusch F., 2010, Representing Death in the News. Journalism, Media and Mortality, Australia, Palgrave
Macmillan.
Herman T., 2001, « « Le Président est mort. Vive le Président ». Images de soi dans l’éloge funèbre
de François Mitterrand par Jacques Chirac », pp. 197-202, in : Dominicy M., Frédéric M., dirs, La
mise en scène des valeurs. La rhétorique de l’éloge et du blâme, Paris, Delachaux et Niestlé.
Hintermeyer P., 2003, Euthanasie, la dignité en question, Paris, Buchet-Chastel.
Jacquin G., dir., 2003, Le récit de la mort. Écriture et histoire, Rennes, Presses universitaires de
Rennes.
Jankélévitch V., 1977, La Mort, Paris, Flammarion
— 1994, Penser la mort, Paris, L. Levi.
Kresta R., 1996, « « Nachrufe » in englischen und deutschen Fachzeitschriften der Soziologie:
Untersuchungen zu einer vernachlässigten Textsorte », Fachsprache, vol. 1, 3-4, pp. 118-137.
Krieg-Planque A., 2003, « Purification ethnique ». Une formule et son histoire, Paris, CNRS Éd.
— 2006, « « Formules » et « lieux discursifs » : propositions pour l’analyse du discours politique »,
Semen, 21. Accès : http://semen.revues.org./1938
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
17
Kübler-Ross E., 1969, Les derniers instants de la vie, trad. de l’anglais par C. Jubert et É. de Peyer,
Genève, Labor et Fides, 1997.
Lahire B., 1996, « Inégalités, partages, spécificités et différences dans les usages sociaux de
l’écrit », pp. 115-128, in : Barré de Miniac C., dir., Vers une didactique de l’écriture. Pour une approche
pluridisciplinaire, Bruxelles/Paris, DeBoeck/ INRP.
Latour B., 2010, Cogitamus. Six lettres sur les humanités scientifiques, Paris, Éd. La Découverte.
Lits M., dir., 1993, La peur, la mort et les médias, Bruxelles, Éd. Vie ouvrière.
— 1994, Le roi est mort. Émotions et médias, Bruxelles, Éd. Vie ouvrière.
— 1996, Récit, médias et société, Louvain-la-Neuve, Éd. Academia-Bruylant.
Long G., 1987, « Organizations and identity: Obituaries 1856-1972 », Social forces, 65-4,
pp. 964-1001.
Makarova A., 2003, « Dits et non-dits des nécrologies de la presse », Le temps des médias, 1,
pp. 108-118.
Marion Ph., 1993, « Fictions de la peur. Peur immédiate et peur médiate », pp. 161-177, in : Lits M.,
dir, La peur, la mort et les médias, Bruxelles, Éd. Vie ouvrière.
Moore S., 2002, « Disinterring ideology from a corpus of obituaries: a critical post mortem »,
Discourse and society, 13-4, pp. 495-536.
Rabatel A., 2008, « Pour une conception éthique des débats politiques dans les médias : répondre
de, devant, pour, ou les défis de la responsabilité collective », Questions de communication, 13,
pp. 47-69.
— 2009, « L’arrestation de Jésus et la représentation de Judas en Jean, 18, 1-12. Une relecture mise
en perspective avec l’univers de la gnose et l’Évangile de Judas », Études théologiques et religieuses,
T. 84, vol. 1, pp. 49-79.
— 2010, « Le traitement médiatique des suicides à France Télécom de mai-juin à mi-août 2009 : la
lente émergence de la responsabilité du management dans les suicides en lien avec le travail »,
Studia universitas Babes-Bolyai, Philologia, T. LV, vol. 1, pp. 31-52.
Rabatel A., Chauvin-Vileno A., éds, 2006, « Effacement énonciatif et responsabilité dans les
médias », Semen, 22.
— 2006, « La question de la responsabilité dans les médias », Semen, 22, pp. 5-24.
Rabatel A., Koren R., éds, 2008, « La responsabilité collective dans la presse », Questions de
communication, 13, pp. 7-24.
Revaz F., 1997, « Le récit dans la presse écrite », Pratiques, 94, pp. 19-33.
— 2000, « La nécrologie : un genre rédactionnel ? », Semen, 13, pp. 187-204.
Ringlet G., 1992, Ces chers disparus : essai sur les annonces nécrologiques dans la presse francophone,
Paris, A. Michel.
1993, « Et à l’heure de notre mort. La peur en nécrologie », pp. 65-76, in : Lits M., dir., La peur, la
mort et les médias, Bruxelles, Éd. Vie ouvrière.
Rivet D., 1994, « L’expression du fait religieux dans le carnet mortuaire du Temps et du Monde : de
la fin du XIXe siècle à aujourd’hui », Chrétiens et sociétés XVe-XXe siècles, 1, pp. 7-34.
Roth K., Roth J., 1988, « Öffentliche Todesanzeigen (Flugblatt-Nekrologe) in Südosteuropa. Ein
Beitrag zum Verhältnis zu Tod und Trauer », Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 3,
pp. 253-267.
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
18
Salmon C., 2007, Storytelling. La machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits, Paris, Éd. La
Découverte.
Simonin M., 1988, « Ronsard et la tradition de l’épitaphios », pp. 85-99, in : Ernst G., dir., La mort
dans le texte, Lyon, Presses universitaires de Lyon.
Thanassekos Y., 2007, « La rhétorique de la catastrophe », Questions de communication, 12,
pp. 41-56.
Thomas L.-V., 1991a, La mort en question, Paris, Éd. L’Harmattan.
— 1991b, « L’homme et la mort », pp. 803-868, in : Poirier J., dir., Histoire des mœurs, T. 2, Modes et
modèles, Paris, Gallimard.
— 2000, Les chairs de la mort, Paris, Institut d’édition Sanofi-Synthélabo.
Urbain J.-D., 1989, L’archipel des morts. Le sentiment de la mort et les dérives de la mémoire dans les
cimetières d’Occident, Paris, Plon.
Vernant J.-P., 1996, L’individu, la mort, l’amour. Soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne, Paris,
Gallimard.
Vovelle M., 1974, Mourir autrefois. Attitudes collectives devant la mort aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Paris,
Julliard.
— 1983, La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours, Paris, Gallimard.
Walter T., 1994, The Revival of Death, London, Routledge.
Walter J., 2005, La Shoah à l’épreuve de l’image, Paris, Presses universitaires de France.
NOTES
1. The blog in question, which dates back to 2009, can be found at the following address:
babyfaithhope.blogspot.com.
2. See www.paperblog.fr/1737050/jade-goody-est-morte-du-cancer. See also the announced
death of Farrah Fawcett on paperblog.
3. J. Baudrillard refers to the famous article by G. Gorer (1955).
4. This text (together with the articles in the presentation) was written before publication of the
work by Harrusch (2010). We shall return to this in the presentation in issue 20 of Questions de
Communication.
5. The cover-ups that exist on the personal level may include the disposition of bodies,
sometimes using highly sophisticated techniques (cf. embalming in the United States). The living
no longer dare to express their pain to any extent; wearing a black armband has fallen out of
fashion, as has mourning clothing. And yet, as some people recognise, this was a tangible sign of
distress that could provoke discussion, and provide gentle help in dealing with bereavement
(Châtelet, 2004).
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
19
AUTHORS
ALAIN RABATEL
Interactions, corpus, learning, representations
CNRS
Université Lumière-Lyon 2
ENS-Lyon
Alain.Rabatel@univ-lyon1.fr
MARIE-LAURE FLOREA
Interactions, corpus, learning, representations
CNRS
Université Lumière-Lyon 2
ENS-Lyon
mlflorea@free.fr
Re-Presentations of Death in the Information Media
Questions de communication, 19 | 2013
20
