A sign of war: The strategic use of violent imagery in contemporary Lebanese political rhetoric

This article evaluates the manner in which events or locations from the Lebanese civil war (1975–1989) are evoked in contemporary Lebanese political discourse and how individual Lebanese respond to such evocations. The indexing of civil strife in current political discourse through the citation of historically contested ‘flashpoints’ revives in the Lebanese public a social tension that is regimented and naturalized as a product of contemporary events and works to reshape social relations. I argue that the indexical alignment of violent signs in this context is a means of laminating sign events from different realms in an attempt to generate a cohesive collective memory. Drawing on points of contested meaning in an environment of active political re-configuration, Lebanese political actors are able to reorganize their versions of the past in order to restructure the present.