“Covid-19, a gripezinha!”: the interface between the Parmenidian and the Gorgian perspective on the official discourse of the Brazilian State in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

the interface between the Parmenidian and the Gorgian perspective on the official discourse of the Brazilian State in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

Abstract

The scourge of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil, still in force, still exposes a cruelly multifaceted reality by countless discourses constructed by descriptors, among which I highlight: science, vaccine, scientific denialism, irony, cynicism and deaths, many deaths. I sought, in this work, in the Eleatic Parmenides, certainly, the word that was most impacted in the light of the discussion: knowledge, with its truth and its repercussions in the daily life of a Republic of more than 200 million Brazilian beings at the mercy of a war of opinions that bordered on hate speech and irony punctuated by stupidity. I resorted to the Platonic dialogue between Gorgias and Socrates to identify how presidential speeches built, on the basis of a strategically and cynically prepared rhetoric, a chain of negationist speeches that spread across the country, almost always minimizing not only the scientific discourse in defense of a vaccine, but also delaying any possibility of streamlining a vaccine that would fight the coronavirus. Insistently, in spite of the rapid development of the vaccine, the rhetoric-denialist discourse tried, and in many cases succeeded, with its “similar power to make the doctor its slave, and even convince the judges in the courts”, in the words of Gorgias in the at which, responding to Socrates' provocation, he architects his theory of the effectiveness of the art of rhetoric. In another perspective, in the light of Discourse Analysis in the French Line, I used the notions of discourse as a historical-ideological construct, built in everyday life by imaginary formations that are weaved and determine our actions. In the analysis, I report the footnotes as relevant because most of them mention updated statistical data about the pandemic.