That which names the law: Madre Tierra (Mother Earth)

Abstract

This paper is supported by the theory of Discourse Analysis proposed by Michel Pêcheux. Its corpus is comprised of two legal texts: Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra (Ley nº 71/2010) (Law of the Rights of Mother Earth) and Ley Marco de La Madre Tierra y Desarrollo Integral para Vivir Bien (Ley nº. 300/2012) (Law of Mother Earth and Integral Development for “Well Living”), both passed in the Plurinational State of Bolivia. The emerge of Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) as the name of a law reverberates through the voice of indigenous peoples, a native cosmovision memory as a resistance discourse against the process of silencing their history. By focusing on the process of subjectivity and the ‘rumbles’ that this event can cause, the goal is to analyze which effects of meaning and theoretical displacement are produced from the way one names, designates, refers to, and turns Madre Tierra into legal subject in its linguistic-discursive materialization within a legal text. Additionally, how it operates the concepts of lack, excess and strangeness (ERNST, 2009) in the analysis of the name that names a law.