Analysis of political discourse: meaning effects upon Brazilian military dictatorship in pronouncements of Jair Bolsonaro in Câmara dos Deputados
Military dictatorship. Discourse analysis. Political discourse.
The research intends to analyze eleven pronouncements made by Jair Messias Bolsonaro between 2004 and 2016 in the House of Representatives, in order to identify how the period of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985) is signified in such statements. The selected pronouncements were analyzed based on the formulations of Laclau (2013) and Morais (2019) about the division of the social field into two antagonistic poles, and on Pêcheux’s propositions about the political discourse as an “exemplary representative of various types of discursive processes” (PÊCHEUX, 1997a, p. 77), being a space marked by the dispute over meanings (PÊCHEUX, 2014b). The analysis allowed us to point out that Bolsonaro's statements are characterized not only by the dichotomization of social space (LACLAU, 2013), constitutive of the form of political discourse that we proposed, dividing society into two poles in an oppositional relationship, but also by a military logic that points out an internal enemy (ANDRADE, 2019). The analysis also indicated that the military dictatorship is signified as a revolution in counterpoint to a supposed communist threat.