The discursive forms of Bolsonarist pastorate

Abstract

This present article examines the actuality of discursive practices in Brazilian politics with the aim of proposing a critique of the pastoral power forms updated on fundamentalist practices in the Bolsonaro Government. Therefore, we dialogue with Foucauldian theses at two points: in the proposition of a theory of discursive forms, centrally expressed in the work The Archeology of knowledge (FOUCAULT, [1969] 2007) and in the resumption of studies on pastoral power studies, notably in the course Security, Territory, Population (FOUCAULT, [1977-1978] 2008). We extracted from the archive a series of utterances that circulated on the Twitter platform from 2018 to 2022. As a relevant current issue, the Bolsonarist pastorate is historically and semantically structured propagating forms of rationality and power correlations that articulate the political with the religious, militarism and belief in absolute moral values. The exercise of the technology of pastoral power in Brazil makes visible the emergence of the will for an authoritarian society and the crisis of the democratic political experience.