Enunciative inscriptions/ insurrections in different environments

pejorative discourses, discursive resignification and revascularization

Abstract

Injurious discourses, which are the ones that harm human dignity, are present in several different contexts – from the simplest to the most technologically sophisticated ones – and circulate from the inside of bathroom doors in Brazilian universities, especially male ones, to digital environments. At the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, denouncing and deconstructing this type of hate speech has become an unavoidable political project (not only, but primarily) for discursivists. More or less in the academic wake of what Marie-Anne Paveau (2019a, 2019b), Michel Pêcheux (1990), and Paveau, Baronas and Lourenço (2021) have been doing elsewhere, each in their own way and with their own theoretical and methodological tools, just to mention two prominent authors from across the Atlantic. In this article, our work takes these authors as inspiration and seeks to discuss strategies for dealing with these insulting discourses, without getting restricted to their genealogy and/or their description/interpretation. These are very relevant aspects, from a linguistic-discursive point of view, but they are not very powerful. Based on the examination of discursive practices engendered by offended and injured subjects, who seek to respond to the offenses and injuries inflicted on them, turning these responses into active sites of memory, our fundamental question is to produce a theoretical gesture on such practices. For this sake, we have put the categories of resistance (Pêcheux, 1990), resignification (Paveau, 2019a, 2019b; Paveau; Baronas; Lourenço, 2021) and discursive revascularization (Baronas; Costa, 2022; Baronas; Costa; Conti, 2021; Baronas; Souza, 2024) into perspective. The ultimate goal of this work is to contribute to the construction of a decent society (Margalit, 2007).