Literacy and juridical discourse

Author(s)

Dionéia Motta Monte Serrat

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Ribeirão Preto.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto (PCARP/BC)
• Defense date: 2013-02-26

Examining board members

Leda Verdiani Tfouni; Jose Francisco Miguel Henriques Bairrao; Suzy Maria Lagazzi; María Del Carmen Lorenzatti; Nilton Milanez

• Advisor: Leda Verdiani Tfouni

Abstract

In this study we investigated enunciation within the rite of a court hearing under the perspective of the theories of Discourse Analysis (PÊCHEUX, 1988), Literacy (TFOUNI, 1992, 2005) and Psychoanalysis (LACAN, 1949) keeping in mind that enunciation is a place where the subject is constituted and that a subject is conceived as effects of meaning between interlocutors within a socio-historical context. The ritual in the discursive practices of the Laws discourse allows us to consider as different the concepts of laws subject and juridical subject. While the first is related to cohesion and to a single meaning, the second is linked to what Pêcheux (1988) calls \"speaking intersubjectivity\" and appears as an effect of language, both divided and opaque. We can observe the disruption of the laws subject cohesive image within the ritual of the judicial court session -characterized by a superposition of speeches - when the grammar of Laws discourse works outside its logical process, out-of-a kind of fetishism that surrounds the mode of operation of ideology and the unconscious. When we move away from this practice, we found that, under the image of the laws subject, inside the discursive functioning, there is the image of the juridical subject, steeped in subjectivity and marginalized by the discourse of Law. Although interpellation by ideology masks the material character of meaning by imposing transparency to it, Pêcheux brings a warning about the possibility of resistance and revolt within the process of subjection. This event, under the perspective of psychoanalysis (LACAN, 1972-1973), which conceives the subject as divided and non-centered, allows for understanding the discourse subject under the dimension of the effect of the signifier, and it leads us to the conclusion that subjectivity is a place that plays a dual role: that of disclosing subjection and that of disclosing its subversion, thus breaking the vicious circle of idealism and interrupting the tragic fate of the subject that is captured by ideological interpellation. We can observe the discursive practices of the Law under the perspective of the Lacans (1949) optical schema to study the constitution of the image of laws subject superimposed to the image of the deponent subject that enunciates during the rite of an audience, while the first one compels the construction of a unique sense of the speech. If we consider that the State plays the role of the mirror in the optical schema to give a cohesive image of the body described by the Discourse of the Law, this image breaks with the emergency of a split subject, due to failures and lapses, constituted outside the legal logic. If under one perspective the Discourse of the Law describes the body, under another perspective we may assert that the displacement of the rigid structure of the syllogism characterizes a resistance to the dominant ideological formation of this discourse, as something that brings up what was repressed, making the law a trace without a body. (AU)