The paradox of discursive categorization
Discourse analysis implies a preliminary gesture of categorization, from which various typologies of discourse can be issued, in order to extract from the world’s noise proper corpus to be analyzed. Yet the phenomenon of discursive circulation and interdiscursivity shows us that beyond the initial need to categorize (which is necessary for the analysis), social discourses participate in each other, questioning the types/genres of discourse that serve their analysis. Examining this paradox, this article proposes a reflection on the notion of discursive circulation and the process of inter-discursive re-signification. Through the analysis of the contemporary advertising and anti-advertisement discourse in France, we will see how two opposite types of discourse mutually re-signify each other, to the point where we have to change our perspective from an architectural and typological conception of discourse to the vision of a large weft of discursive threads in interaction.