THE CONSTITUTION OF SUBJECTS AND MEANINGS: THE CASE OF THE QUOTAS FOR BLACK PEOPLE

ABSTRACT: In this study, I bring aspects that are related to the constitution of subjects and meanings, according to the French Discourse Analysis approach. As for that, I use four discursive sequences – corpus – taken from articles about quotas for black people published in Veja magazine. The main objective in this study is to discuss and relate theoretical propositions of the French Discourse Analysis about the constitution of the subject and of the meaning with the corpus for analysis, which composes a research recently concluded. The work is mainly based in the studies of Pêcheux (2009 [1988]). Under the theoretical perspective of the French Discourse Analysis, we may affirm that the subject is considered an effect of external processes which constitute him and which, meanwhile, erase this mechanism. The referred constitution results in the evidence that the subject is the origin, the controller of the meanings he expresses, or that are produced through his saying. Thus, it will be possible to ask “how or why is the subject an effect?” and “how can he not be the origin and the source of what is enunciated, if every person can only think about himself as being a subject (I am… I think…)?”. It is guided by these questions that I develop the observations of the referred approach.   KEYWORDS: subject; meaning effects; discourse.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL “A GENTLE CREATURE”

This paper has the objective to analyze the novel “A Gentle Creature”, of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, using the theoretical concepts covered in the text “1874 – Three Novellas, or ‘What Happened?’” (1996), which makes up the volume 3 of the work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. These concepts can be triggered to realize the approach of the question about the segmentarity lines, which make it possible to make the observation of the changes of state that have occurred with the characters in a literary work, of the ways how undertake movements of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization in development of such segmentarity lines, which are termed as hard or molar, molecular or malleable, and trail, having the view that it is through them that these characters go through this transformation process. Starting from this analysis, will pick up, too, to connect the theory of these two French philosophers with polyphonic theory presented by Russian philosopher and theorist of language Mikhail Bakhtin in the book Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics (1997), which investigate the concept of polyphony, from Dostoevsky's work, being, among other texts analyzed the Russian novelist, novel to be studied in this work. And the perspective that arises in the analysis proposed in this article, what is sought is to conduct a parallel investigation of how both theories have the possibility of development work in the observation of the characteristics of a literary work, and these characteristics likely to these concepts are related to the lines of segmentarity deleuzo-guattarianas and Bakhtin's polyphony.

About meanings and subjects: the prosperity in the “metropolis of the future”

This study has the objective of analyzing, based on the theoretical and methodological device of the French Discourse Analysis, the meanings that (are) produce(d) (in) the photographs that compose the special report entitled “Cidades médias” (“Medium-sized cities”), published by Veja magazine in September, 2010. This report aims, according to the magazine, at highlighting which are the Brazilian cities that are considered “metropolis of the future”, for making possible, amongst other elements, also the obtainment of financial success. If the photographs in the media act as supports of the linguistic materiality, as representations of reality, I intend in this study: work with the effect of evidence produced by the photograph; reflect about the ideological crossing, which determines what can and must be said and, therefore, what cannot and must not be said; analyze in what way this crossing passes by the image and what is its representation in the journalistic discourse; and analyze which are the meanings produced by the photographs that compose the special report on Veja magazine; also in their relation to the subjects introduced there. For my investigation, I was based on the contributions of Barthes (1984) and Dubois (1993) and in some important concepts for the Discourse Analysis field found in Pêcheux (2009 [1988]) and Orlandi (2007 [1992]; 1995).

Epistemological and philosophical refluxes in the constitution of the Pecheuxtian Discourse Analysis

This article aims at verifying influences of epistemological and philosophical basis constitutive of the French Discourse Analysis (DA), more specifically that one based on the studies of Michel Pêcheux.  For him, the social class, the socio-historic and cultural interpellation of the subject are determining of meanings and are linked with the Marxist historical materialism, via Althusser, as well as with the lacanian Psychoanalysis and with the saussurian Linguistics. His writings also influences by Michel Foucault, especially during the so-called “third phase” of the DA. Thus, between the two philosophical lines which cross science for centuries, that is, the formalist-logicist and the rationalist-idealism, the Discourse Analysis has a strong connection with this last one.