WAR AS A RHETORICAL MODEL

mythical memory, lexicon of order and argumentative inversion Them x Us in the political discourse of the Brazilian far right

Abstract

In this text, we aim to investigate the rhetorical model of the political discourse of the Brazilian far right today. We are particularly interested in the relationship between mythical memory (Pêcheux, 2007), argumentation and violence (Perelman; Olbrechts-Tyteca, 2014; Amossy, 2017). To this end, we conducted a qualitative and quantitative lexical analisis of 922 statements made by Congressman Jair Bolsonaro in the Chamber of Deputies between 2000 and 2018. That said, in the first section, we discussed the relationship between the sacred and violence in the constitution of cultures, especially with regard to the moral organization of the world and the senses of order. In the second, we conducted a historical analysis of the relationship between war and the legitimization of violence in the West. In the third and final section, we address the argumentative-discursive problems of our research, describe our qualitative-quantitative method of assembling the corpus, and, finally, perform the lexical analyses. As conclusions, we propose the fusion of ultraconservative military and fundamentalist religious discourses in the organization of the political discourse of the current Brazilian far right, the relationship between the rhetoric of war and mythical memory and the inverted argumentative formula Them vs. Us.