From discursive event to discourse événement: a case study of political-religious discourse in Argentina

BONNIN, JUAN EDUARDO

Discourse & Society

SAGE Publications

Lugar: London, Thousands Oaks, CA and New Delhi; Año: 2010 vol. 22

0957-9265

            This article analyzes the interplay between religious and political discourse in Argentina, departing from a case study located in the transition towards democracy in April, 1987, and conveying military, political and religious discourse within the conflicts that surrounded the government of President Raúl R. Alfonsín (1983-1989). It involved a well established discourse genre, the homily, within a historical social practice, the Catholic mass; but it also included the violation of one of its main features: namely the monopoly of talk by priests. By challenging the bishop’s monologue, questioned by the homily, President Alfonsín settled a different ground, neither religious nor political, an événement (Pêcheux, 1984) that required urgent recontextualization. The mass media, as privileged agents representing contemporary social practices, recontextualized it through multimodal attribution of genericity (Adam and Heidmann, 2004) in two main different ways, ascribing the event to either religious or political field. In both cases, as we will see later, the actions and actors involved were consistently opposite, responding to different ideological motivations and with different strategic goals. The underlying theoretical point is that genres are not fixed in events but rather they represent ways of dealing with the exceptionality of événements that bring out ideological or political tensions.