The representation of oneself in political-narrative discourses: from <i>lambda</i> to <i>ethos</i>

Abstract

In this article we analyze, from a polyphonic and non-referential perspective of enunciation (Ducrot 1984), a set of political-narrative discourses, that is, micronarration where the political speaker talks about himself in the recent past. In those discourses, we inquire the way in which the speaker represents himself in his narrative and the link of that representation with the “prior ethos”. Based on the idea that Kirchner projects a “militant ethos” and Mujica presents an “old wise man” one, we are interested in examining how those images of self are elaborated from their narrative self-representation. To this end, we investigate the possible links between the analytical categories of speaker, lambda, stated ethos and prior ethos (Amossy 2010), and propose the notion of narrated lambda (λN) to address the emergence of the subject of statement in these political-narrative discourses. Within that framework, we identify two distinctive scenographies (Maingueneau 1999), the testimonial and the memorial one, which demarcate and overdeterminate the constitution of subjectivity in these political discourses.