Politics of haunting: bolsonarist populism as a production of uncanny doubles

• Autor(a) principal: Ferraz, Maria Cristina Franco
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Saint Clair, Ericson
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Galáxia (São Paulo)
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/galaxia/article/view/57538
• topic: populism; bolsonarism; social media; Unheimliche; biopolitics; populismo; bolsonarismo; redes sociais; Unheimliche; biopolítica

The article investigates the relationship between opinion management on social networks and the artifices of Bolsonaro’s ultra-right- wing populism in Brazil. The Nietzschean-inspired genealogical ethos directed the empirical research around the meanings of the word freedom as found in Twitter posts collected on September 7, 2021, the date of a noisy demonstra- tion — with a coup-like character — in support of the government. By analyzing the data produced by the web scraping technique, we identified an important bolsonarista tactic: the production of doubles of words traditionally associated with the democratic lexicon. More than eroding the meaning of such words, such strategy allows what could be called a process of haunting them, inoculat- ing estrangement (das Unheimliche) in their previously crystallized meanings. As an effect, a deliberate production of instability and insecurity is insinuated for manipulating sad passions as a vector of a population’s biopolitics.