The Discourse of Conflict focuses on the "prison war" between Republican inmates and their British captors, and the subsequent "dirty" protest and hunger strikes, to deal with two problems central to contemporary philosophy: the unacknowledged bias of structuralist theory towards linguistic signs and the lack of a coherent theorisation of social conflict.

To address these conundrums, Hately reconciles Saussurean and Peircean semiotics and then uses Ruthrof's corporeal pragmatics to break from the verbocentric idea of language as a closed system, showing instead that verbal meanings originate from the body, its senses and its imagination, as informed by the deixis of individual communities. With the transformation of linguistic semiotics into corporeality, Foucault's notion of discourse and the neglected category of discursive practice are then reworked to show how statements based on nonverbal signs might function discursively.

The culmination of the 1970s Northern Irish prison war in the events of the 1981 hunger strikes offers a study that unites the focus upon nonverbal discourses with the examination of conflict. In exploring the ways in which Republican hunger strikers struggled for legitimacy with the prison authorities, Hately shows how previous notions of conflict, especially Lyotard's différend, are thrown into disrepute by a corporeal perspective recognising the intersemiotic and heterosemiotic character of communication.

The availability of diverse semiotic media such as the visual, the haptic, the proximic, etc., offers positions in which conflicts may be regulated without ending in the stalemate Lyotard describes. The division of semio-discursive phenomena into verbal and nonverbal elements, and the tracing of the effects these elements have upon ideational and pragmatic planes of action, also reveal a variety of strategies related to conflict that are superposable upon other instances. As a result, The Discourse of Conflict suggests that the role of political violence in politics and the meanings associated with the taking of life can be approached from a new angle.

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• Politics & Social Sciences

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