“Don’t think about the crisis, work”: the role of history in the plot of language

Abstract

In this work, based on the theoretical perspective of French Discourse Analysis and mobilizing notions such as metaphorical effect (PÊCHEUX, 1997 [1969]) and identification modality (PÊCHEUX, 2009 [1988]), we analyze the speech of the interim president Michel Temer, given the swearing-in of new ministers due to the dismissal of president Dilma Rousseff. We also examine the displacements of the enunciation “Don’t think about the crisis, work,” uttered by Michel Temer, which circulated in different posts. We present how the metaphoric effect works in such posts, producing inconsistencies in the supposed presidential legitimacy, a counter-identification of the subjects with the discourse addressed to them, thus creating spaces of resistance to a discourse of domination and segregation of the subjects.