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AI image Introduction: From Tweet to Meme Over the past decade, the landscape of digital communication has undergone a radical transformation. The era of brief, aphoristic tweets—where linguistic wit condensed virality into a few characters—seems to have given way to a new form of writing: the visual meme. Today, internet culture is no longer structured around text but around the image infused with affect. This passage from language to visuality marks a profound mutation in the economy of the sign—one that can be interpreted, following Peirce, Derrida, Baudrillard, and others, as a shift from symbol to icon, and more broadly, from logos to pathos . Contemporary virality is no longer measured by the argumentative strength of discourse, but by an image’s capacity to circulate, to affect, to provoke reaction. From political memes caricaturing public figures with Mexican hats to endless ironic variations on gestures or phrases, the sign has become instantaneous, plastic, and globally ...

AI image Introduction: The New Hieroglyphs of Politics The digital landscape has shifted. A decade ago, the brief, aphoristic tweet reigned as the dominant form of online discourse — a remnant of the phonetic, linear tradition of writing. Today, however, the meme has overtaken it, establishing an aesthetic regime where images, captions, and icons define the rhythms of collective meaning. In the United States, political culture itself has become deeply visual: politicians appear in memes wearing Mexican hats, wielding maracas, or reimagined in pop-cultural tableaux. What once belonged to the margins — the comic, the pictorial, the non-discursive — now sets the tone of public debate. This inversion, seemingly trivial, recalls a deeper philosophical tension that Jacques Derrida traced in Of Grammatology (1967): the hierarchical opposition between phonetic and nonphonetic writing, between the linear voice and the graphic trace. The meme’s ascendancy thus signals not merely a shift in ...