| Summary: | The analysis of contemporary debates suggests that an important part of the participants’ discursive activity is devoted to a strategy of framing that seeks to propose a certain interpretative context for the exchange of arguments. One of the stakes of such a framing activity is to endow the confrontation with a significant temporality. This paper combines insights of the sociology of controversies with argumentation studies in order to account for the way in which the actors and their lines of arguments are mapped strategically onto a discursive temporality (specifying what is deemed obsolete, what is forecast, what is stigmatized as implausible or impossible). Symmetrically, it shows how the ways of arguing and the treatment of time develop in the course of the ongoing debates. Starting from the use of the French adverb “désormais” in the Preamble of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, we extend our analysis to contemporary controversies concerning GMOs, asbestos, nanotechnology, nuclear energy. We show that paying attention to such a temporal marker provides good indications about the way in which the participants themselves construct the decisive moments of the debate by emphasizing the nature of the event at the start of such a turning point, or by pointing to the characterization of the new era that has just began.
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