Pandemic of the Word

the curve of denialism as a politics of death in Brazil

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the denialist discourses delivered by former president Jair Bolsonaro during the COVID-19 pandemic, examining them as discursive practices that, while circulating in the public sphere, produced material effects in the management of Brazil’s health crisis. Such enunciations operated as pathogenic vectors of a Pandemic of the Word — that is, a discursive contagion capable of normalizing death and spreading disinformation. Methodologically, the research combines the quantitative use of the Exponential Moving Average (EMA) to measure discursive propagation in parallel with the epidemiological curves of deaths, and the application of the archaeogenealogical method, inspired by Foucault (1996; 1999; 2005), to understand the historical, political, and discursive conditions that made the emergence and repetition of these statements possible. The archaeological categories (discursive formation, statement, historical a priori, and archive) and genealogical ones The Order of Discourse, biopower/biopolitics, and necropower (Mbembe, 2018) were mobilized as analytical tools. The results show that the presidential discourses functioned as dispositifs of power that operated through the trivialization of tragedy and the production of subjectivities resistant to public health measures. The EMA revealed the persistence and intensification of these enunciations, which consolidated themselves as discursive curves parallel to the epidemiological ones. The archaeogenealogical analysis demonstrated that these utterances were inscribed in a discursive archive marked by exclusions, interdictions, and enunciative privileges, while the genealogy revealed their link to technologies of power oscillating between biopolitics and necropolitics. It is concluded that the pandemic in Brazil was traversed by a double dimension: biological and discursive. In this scenario, death was not merely the consequence of sanitary failures but also of the calculated proliferation of enunciations that established a second, discursive pandemic. The notion of Pandemic of the Word thus allows us to understand that discourse not only reflects reality but also acts as a pathogenic force, constituting a field of power capable of producing effects of life and death on a social scale.