A construção discursiva do povo na pandemia da Covid-19

Abstract

There is no one who denies the importance of “people” for contemporary politics. In public opinion, among politicians and parties, in literature, there is so much talk about people, but what is a people? Who are people? Is there a people? This dissertation comes up from the multiplicity of imaginaries about people and from a diagnosis of their tangential and/or secondary treatment in the political science literature. In these academic discussions, the multiplicity of contents that “people” can adopt are recurrently identified, but most of the time it is directed either (i) towards denying its analytical utility, alleging abstraction; or (ii) in a treatment that gives it a negative a priori character or (iii) in an attempt to approach the formal-institutional apparatus, emptying it of its analytical potential. Therefore, this research assumes the multiplicity of “people” recognizing that it is a political category that is eminently constructed, precarious and contingent. Mobilizing a postfoundational perspective and the theory of Ernesto Laclau, we seek to identify this multiplicity of meanings that “people” takes, analyzing its discursive constructions, via Twitter, by three political actors - Bolsonaro, Huck and Lula - around of the popular subject facing the event of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this analysis, four types of people are identified - sovereign people, nation people, marginalized people and working people - as the preferential forms of these actors in their attempts to establish a sense of “people”, exploring their discursive articulations and identifying the elements, meanings, logics and political antagonisms involved in such an operation. The analysis conducted indicates the multiplicity of meanings associated with each type, drawing attention to the relationships between such operations and their implications, discussing the potential of such theoretical perspective and empirical exercise in addressing diverse discussions in political science, especially populism and democracy.