Doing and Don’t Let Living: Discursivities about death in the speech of the president of Brazil

Abstract

This paper aims at proposing a reflection on the discursiveness running through the statement “So what? Sorry. What do you want me to do? I am the Messiah, but I do not perform miracles”, by the President of the Republic of Brazil, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, as well as its effects of meaning, under the perspective of the theoretical and methodological foundations of Discourse Analysis of French materialist line. Therefore, we based the discussion on the theoretical assumptions by Pêcheux and Orlandi. The choice for such theme occurred through the repercussion of the Brazilian president’s statements about the advance of the pandemic, after the country suffered a great increase in the number of infected people and had broken a record in number of deaths, surpassing China. In this sense, we mobilized the paraphrastic movement as an analytical device, aiming at understanding the discursive functioning of the aforementioned statement. The Pecheux perspective has the assumption of relating language to its exterior, represented, methodologically, by the situation and by the subject, which are called production conditions. Thus, it is possible to understand how the selected statement produces meanings, through the processes of signification established in the text, describing its functioning, since for Discourse Analysis, language is the materiality of the discourse, and consequently, its relationship with historicity cannot be ignored. The significant materiality, described and analyzed here, allows us to foresee that for the enunciating subject, the pandemic means an apparatus in service for the death of the unwanted, allowing us to say, to paraphrase Foucault, that this is the policy of “making people die and not letting them live”.