La refundación de la democracia argentina. La retórica constitutiva del discurso inaugural del Presidente Raúl Alfonsín

DAGATTI, MARIANO

African Yearbook of Rhetoric

University of Cape Town

Lugar: Ciudad del Cabo; Año: 2017 p. 11 - 19

The construction of democracy involves various kinds of dimensions (political, economic, cultural, etc.). Presidential oratory also has a decisive role to constitute the imaginary of a democratic republic. This article analyzes, from the standpoint of Constitutive Rhetoric (Charland, 1987), the inaugural speech of the Argentine President Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín, pronounced on December 10, 1983, before the Congress of the Nation. Methodological tools from Rhetoric and Discourse Analysis work together in orden to explain how this speech constitutes a democratic people after seven years of dictatorship (1976-1983). The hypothesis is that this piece of speech sought to perform the Argentine people as a democratic subject. This operation involves different rhetorical procedures. We consider one of them: the foundational topic (Charaudeau, 2009). This topic could be inscribed in a long series of government strategies that have tried to define a political frontier between a recent repudiated past, which is still required to be visible and present, and the construction of an auspicious future that emerges as the obverse of that unjust order that ought to be abandoned. The opposition between a democratic people and the authoritarian elites is the main of the rhetorical resources used. The effects of the constitutive procedure are still visible in our present, in which democracy is a fetish, the common political horizon of our time.