Metafora della guerra e guerra alla metafora. Una polemica di prospettiva

The use of the “war metaphor” to deal with the pandemic has been harshly criticized, as this trope has been abused in the media and political discourse, besides being employed in common discourse, and by the infected themselves. In this regard, classic studies on the pervasiveness and effectiveness of metaphors and on their “romanticized” usage in medical-health context have been cited. But the use of metaphors, as the philosophy of language suggests, is consubstantial to human speech (there is no mere neutral language, on the one hand, and no mere surreptitious language, on the other), nor comparing the similar to the similar (as many did by resorting to past plagues) necessarily proves a better semiotic strategy (the epidemic is being compared to war precisely by recognizing that the two are actually different things). The paper aims to reflect on the intertwining between these discoursive tensions and suggest how a properly semiotic approach to the issue cannot coincide with an anti-metaphorical, mechanistic, referentialist and reductionist prescriptivism. Semiotics should be somewhere in between: words have their own efficacy and do act, but they must not be absolutized. They do things, they make believe things and make people do things, but they are not invincible magic formulas, nor do we all use them in the same sense, same way, for the same purposes. Semiotics has the numbers to be the right perspective to object against this tropephobia and ortholexia.