“I am the president”: the saying, the unspoken and the re-spoken in Brazilian State politics in times of pandemic

Abstract

The sanitation, political and economic crisis resulting from COVID-19 have given visibility to the contradictions that permeate the political discourse and the relations between subjects, which, even in the face of an pandemic, cannot leave the struggle for places of power and speech behind. Our objective is to make explicit the processes of production of meanings that constitute the speech of the president of the Country, in times of pandemic, in a space of dispute in the clashes with the speech produced by the Health Minister, in March and April 2020, from what circulated in digital media. It is the challenge of analyzing the discourse at the present, assuming the risks that this endeavor carries in itself. In view of this present time, we identify, through the mobilization of the theoretical-methodological device of the Analysis of Pecheuxtiana Discourse, that the registration of the subjects as a priority in the same discursive formation does not guarantee the coalition success. The subjects, in their speeches, contradict each other / show / hide themselves, signaling for the return of itself in sayings, unspoken and re-spoken. In fact, the analyzes show that they militate in different positions, one defending the vertical social distancing and the other the horizontal social distancing, promoting contradiction, unsustainable antagonism, the rupture.