Political Passions: a model of discourse analysis

Abstract

Emotions inform today a realm of fundational relevance in Discourse Studies in Latin America. It reveals a concern for the design of emotion in and by discourse. The main objective of this article is to present a model of analysis of the projective pathos in political discourses, within the framework of the so-called “Contemporary Trends in the French-speaking Discourse Analysis”. So, the paper presents, in a first section, the two main lines of study of the emotions within the chosen theoretical framework, in order to describe its characteristics and point out the main difficulty to study political emotions. The central section exposes an original model of study of political emotions, an architectural of the projective pathos, which takes into account different levels of organization of emotions. In order to demonstrate the validity of the model, the third section presents the study of the projective pathos in the public speeches (2003-2010) of the former Argentine President Néstor Kirchner. The results lead to confirm the existence of different levels of structuring emotions in the political discourse and the importance of these structures in the link between synchrony and diachrony phenomena. Also, they suggest a new perspective to study the relationship between ethos, logos and pathos in political discourses.