Perigo vermelho: análise cartográfica das práticas discursivas anticomunistas no Brasil.

Abstract

This thesis presents analyses of what we call anticommunist discursive practices, having, as a starting point, enunciations from official speeches of two Presidents of Brazil at different moments in history – one from the 20th Century and another from the 21st -, in order to understand how “protecting the Nation from the evils of communism” seems to work as a discourse in defense of private property in this country. The research presents how these discursive practices stay up-to-date despite the gap of more than 80 years between the analyzed speeches. It also shows, through these enunciations, how communism was a manufactured scare in Brazil as well as the ways in which this idea became rooted in the national unconscious. For this purpose, we have adopted cartography (PASSOS; BARROS, 2015) as a theoretical and methodological path, as we believe in the existence of the researcher’s implications on the research object, thus refusing a positivist perspective of science grounded in the supposed neutrality of the researcher. In order to carry these analyses, we utilize the concepts of discursive formation (FOUCAULT, 1969; MAINGUENEAU, 2015), demonstrating the regularities in these anticommunist discursive practices; scenography (MAINGUENEAU, 2013, 2015; ROCHA, 2006, 2014), when detailing the scenography in which the clash of enunciations takes place; language-as-intervention (ROCHA 2006, 2014), to show how language creates realities; and interdiscourse (MAINGUENEAU, 2015). These concepts make up the theoretical framework of the analyses, in which I identify that those anticommunist discursive practices traverse and are traversed by questions related to the market, morals and conventions, and nationalization. The result of this research-process does not confirm nor deny, through the analyses of the spoken anticommunist enunciations, the hypothesis raised about the defense of private property. It, however, highlights language’s power of intervention and shows how necessary the change of the current paradigms of cognition is, so that subjects can be considered protagonists of their actions in the world, creating, thus, a change in the status quo.