Dal mito all’hashtag: la persistenza estetica della guerra tra narrazione, immagine e partecipazione digitale
DOI :
https://doi.org/10.13129/2281-8138/2026.1.189-210Mots-clés :
Aesthetics of War, Myth, Cinema, Digital Media, Artificial intelligenceRésumé
This article examines how the aestheticization of war transforms across media, and what political work it performs in each context. Through comparative, semiotic analysis of three cases Homeric epic, Hollywood war cinema, and Zelensky's digital communication in the Russo-Ukrainian war the study asks not whether war is aestheticized, but how aesthetic strategies adapt to audiences, technologies, and power. The framework draws on Barthes's semiotics, Virilio and Debord's media theory, and Durand's theory of the imaginary. Aestheticization emerges as an adaptable cultural repertoire rather than a fixed structure: each medium reshapes inherited schemas of heroism to its moment. The article extends this to AI-generated representations, a phase where conflict is both more distant, artificially constructed, and more immediate, sensorially immersive. War's aesthetic appeal is not timeless but a cultural language needing renewal, with implications for the normalization of violence.
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