Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The article offers an interpretative path for cultural products that emerged from the Brazilian political debate during the breakthrough of COVID-19 pandemic information on social media and messaging networks, and that had the performance of Jair Bolsonaro as a reference. Using the theoretical framework of Psychoanalytic Semiotics, it balances speeches and identity profiles present in different psychosocial spheres to investigate cultural mitogenesis bringing light to cancel culture’s phenomena. The analysis deepens the understanding of signifiers such as «gado» (cattle), «imunidade de rebanho» (herd immunity), «virar jacaré» (turn alligator), «cercadinho» (cow pen), «leite» (milk), amongst others, verified in the narratives of the pandemic. Bolsonaro’s representation is articulated with the idea of the «father of the primitive horde» in Freud and the Lacanian Other. It presents psychoanalitical concepts such as unheimlich, das Ding and abjection, dialoguing with Sloterdijk’s spherological theory. It also offers a contemporary overview on the affections and feelings involved in the symbolization and resignification of the semiotic context (mediated by social networks). It considers fake news and post-truth in the political manipulation of the imaginary order (as historical objects) by observing the production of mythological narratives aiming for psychosocial identity processes yield, which seeks to amplify the partisan spheres. The text emphasizes the emotions of fear and the search for immunity as articulators of Brazilian political spheres and the discursive dynamics established between them.

In this article, I discuss aspects of the political approach and media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022 in Brazil, specifically, but also in other regions of the world. I emphasize the high content of thanatopolitical discourses and actions that determined the adoption , or lack thereof, of sanitary conducts and economic measures. Under the bias of semiotics, psychoanalysis and communication theories, I analyze scenarios in which the pandemic and the COVID-19 virus were «hijacked» by extremist ideologies, opening the way for denialism and anti-vaccination campaigns, for example. This whole context of exacerbated malaise in culture also reflects the complexity of the «Era of the Human», the Anthropocene, in which our species is proven to be destructive not only of the biota and other beings, but also of itself.

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Santiago Auserón, Arte sonora. En las fuentes del pensamiento heleno. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama S. A., 2022, 750 págs.

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Aimed at the impacts caused by COVID-19 on education, this article intends to explore how each of the main agents related to the teaching and learning processes in the Brazilian context reacted: the teachers, the technological mediations and, finally, the students. In order to avoid any kind of covert rhetoric, the article is based on research data carried out by several reliable sources.

Laura Kipnis, Love in the Time of Contagion. Nueva York: Pantheon Books, 2022, 210 págs.

Anacleto Ferrer, Facticidad y ficción. Ensayo sobre cinco secuencias fotográficas de perpetración de la Shoah. Valencia: Shangrila, 2020, 226 págs.

Robby Krieger, Set the Night on Fire (Entre la vida y la muerte, tocando la guitarra con The Doors). Traducción de Manuel de la Fuente. Madrid: Alianza editorial, 2022, 352 págs.

Rovira Sánchez, Amparo, El arte es un rumor. Michel Foucault. El filósofo de lo pequeño. Oviedo: KRK Ediciones, 2022, 606 págs.