Event and memory in the COVID-19 pandemic: discourse and network

• Grant number: 20/10660-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: November 01, 2020
• End date: June 01, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Lucília Maria Abrahão e Sousa
• Grantee: Marco Antonio Almeida Ruiz
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto (FFCLRP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Ribeirão Preto , SP, Brazil

Abstract

With this post-doctoral project, we aim to analyze in the light of the discursive theory proposed by Michel Pêcheux and his successors, the way in which the resignification of death was constructed during the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. In other words, we promote a reading gesture based on three memorials created on a social network, Instagram, at the time of the pandemic's emergence - Memorial dos Inumeráveis, Reliquia.rum and Museu do isolamento (in Portuguese) - which produce a slip of meaning about death as resistance to the norms and statistics of a death policy of the Brazilian government. Contrary to official data, which transform the dead into victims in an immense set of tables, the virtual memorials, in their own way, (re) draw death differently, establishing new memories from a given time, a "new normal" as a way of resistance. As a theoretical-methodological basis, we will use the assumptions of Michel Pêcheux (2008, 2010, 2014) about the discursive memory and event, in which we are able to think of the pandemic as an event. Besides, this work is derived from a regular research aid from our supervisor approved by this Foundation (Process no. 2019 / 13385-4), whose objective is to understand the effects of horror in the process of its institutionalization in places open today for visitation (Brazil, Portugal and Latin American countries) - museums, memorials, for example -, materializing sayings that indicate the signs, scars, traces and marks on the body during the Brazilian civic-military dictatorship.