“Liberdade de expressão”: uma análise discursiva dos usos e abusos desse enunciado pela extrema direita brasileira

Abstract

The Brazilian extreme-right, as paradoxical as it may seem, has become the herald of the demand for “freedom of expression.”. It is not, however, the same 'freedom of expression' for which former liberals and current progressives fought. This statement, in its appropriation by the extreme-right, was subjected to an emptying of its signifier, in a subversion of its meaning, which in this update ceases to refer to an inalienable right in democratic societies to become a kind of habeas corpus to protect those who, through verbal expression, violate laws and advance the rights of other citizens, promoting the distortion of consensual and historically established truths, systematically and strategically mobilizing lies and slander as disloyal and illegal instruments in political disputes. It is the analysis of the discursive functioning of these contours and the uses of this utterance in a video, of the documentary genre, by the producer Brasil Paralelo, released on August 17, 2020, entitled “Os donos da Verdade”, to which we dedicate ourselves in this work, supporting ourselves theoretically in some principles of Discourse Analysis, especially of Foucauldian orientation. To this end, we proceeded to identify, select and cut out a series of discursive sequences from the documentary in which the statement 'freedom of expression' appears. Then, we seek to group and characterize these sequences according to their inscription in given discursive formations, and to analyze, from the establishment of their relations with other utterances, the intended effects of meaning. In our analysis, we mainly use the conceptions of “discourse” and “utterance” according to Foucault's (1987, 2014) perspective, of “discursive formation” as also defined by Michel Pêcheux (2018), and of “discursive memory” according to Jean-Jacques Courtine (1999, 2009).