O pedinte, o experiente e o grandiloqüente: ethé discursivos de presidentes da América do Sul

Abstract

In 2006, the reelection of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Lula in Brazil, and Evo Morales's election in Bolivia took place. These three social actors begin to receive attention from the media and international political analysts not only because of the energy potential (oil and gas) that unites their countries in ever growing commercial trade, but also because of those leaders' charismatic, polemic and symbolic personalities - all of them have great levels of empathy and antipathy. The timely coincidence of the rising of presidents with profiles connected to a popular or populist approach reveals how the leftist discursive memory updates itself in their speeches, beyond the ethé related to the presidents. Our aim is to detect, through linguistic clues (modality and subject), traces of subjectivity and heterogeneity that set up discursive images and memories related to the leftist tradition in the continent. We start from a major issue the comprehension of the current political scenario, considering the various controversies related to the three presidents to get to our research s core: in a sample of a political discourse, in the inauguration address genre, what is the discursive construction of presidential ethé that are crossed by the voices of I and Other? What puts them away and what brings them closer? We used the theoretical basis of the enunciative Discourse Analysis and the concepts proposed by Maingueneau (2004 and 2005) and Amossy (2005): ethos, discursive practice and discursive memory; by Bakhtin (2006), discursive gender; by Authier-Revuz (1998), discursive heterogeneity. As analytical categories, Cervoni (1989), modality and Benveniste (1995), subject traces. The corpus selection was determined by discursive stabilities found in the inauguration address genre. The analysis, departing from those stabilities, was organized into blocks related to: autobiography, acknowledgments, promises and historical review. In each block, the marked traces of the presidential ethé were observed. The results indicate traces of similar ethos in Chávez' and Morales' speeches', yet differently and through particular linguistic marks. A mosaic of possible references to a bolivarian left is formed through images and inter-discourses. Lula also presents images that refer to a leader of the people, but he does not show as much evidence of the marked heterogeneity as the others, without the mobilization of the leftist discursive memory of his counterparts, which creates an image of selfconfidence and security and more intellectual independence towards the others