Meaning production about an absent image: towards Lula’s coercive conduction in the scope of Operation Lava-Jato

Abstract

In March 2016, the former president Lula was conducted through a coercive way by the Federal Police in order to depose about his involvement in suspect activities related to Operation Lava Jato. The shooting or any other register of this coercive conduction have been forbidden, thus the national media began to work in the verge of this “denied image”. In this paper, we investigate the process of meaning production about this “absent image” through other images and materialities that circulate in the media discourse game regarding the destabilization/ stabilization of evidence about the March fourth current events. Therefore, the concept of lack, excess and strangeness, established by Ernst, were fundamental. We started with the hypothesis that, answering the lack of imagetic register, it was established a profusion of other imagetic, audiovisual and/or verbal discourses.