Political cartoons in the COVID-19 pandemic: speeches to think and discuss the human condition

Abstract

This article has as its main theme the approach of texts that produce meanings about the human condition in contemporaneity, more specifically during the Covid-19 Pandemic, investigating how language as discourse can collaborate in the constitution of the contemporary subject. The discursive genre listed was the political cartoon by the Brazilian cartoonist Laerte, aired on social media (Instagram). For this, the clipping for analysis was carried out from the corpus collected in the first quarter of the social isolation imposed by the quarantine period, between the months of March and May 2020. From an interdisciplinary perspective that encompasses the precepts of the analysis of the French discourse and issues relevant to the discipline of the humanities, with theoretical contributions by Maingueneau (2007), Appadurai (2019), Orlandi (2007), Romualdo (2000), among others, we focused on the object of analysis, investigating its relation to historical materiality, as well as how much it was affected by it. By looking at the discourses and their conditions of production, and proposing an analysis, we find that political cartoon can exist with multiple functions, from ideological expression to social denunciation. In this sense, they constitute potential possibilities for the discussion of the human condition in contemporaneity, and at the end of this process, we expect to understand the relationships established between the discourses and the subjects, as well as the dimension of the relationship the socio-historical materiality focuses on this production.