Discourse and religion in the event of COVID-19

Abstract

In this work, we present the results of a research that aimed to analyze the COVID-19 pandemic as a discursive event in the religious field, verifying which discourses are materialized in the statements of religious groups and which memories are resumed and updated in the face of the COVID-19 health crisis. The research corpus consisted of texts that circled in digital media, from March 2020 to March 2021, and which deal with the way in which religious discourse approached the pandemic. This time frame comprises the period in which the first texts about the pandemic are put into circulation and goes up to a year after the publication of these first texts. We defend the hypothesis that the historical event of the COVID-19 health crisis was also configured in a discursive event, and that in this there is the resumption of different memories, linked to subject-positions that refer both to the religious field and to the medical-medical field. scientific and economic field. Such a hypothesis can also be unfolded in order to indicate that there is, in the religious field, the establishment of a tense relationship, since already-said meanings are linked to new meanings to build the discourses against the closing of the temples. To verify this hypothesis, we carried out a discursive analysis of materialities, based on the theoretical assumptions of the French School of Discourse Analysis, mainly on the notions of discourse, discursive event, discursive memory and subject-position, presented in Michel Pêcheux's texts.