Symbolic Foundation and Discursive Rationality in Juscelino Kubitschek’s Speech at the Inauguration of Brasília

Abstract

This article analyzes President Juscelino Kubitschek’s speech at the inauguration of Brasília (April 21, 1960) as a founding discursive event, responsible not merely for accompanying but for symbolically instituting the meaning of the new capital. Drawing on Michel Meyer’s Problematology, the speech is understood as a response to a specific political and rhetorical problem: the need to confer historical legitimacy on an undertaking marked by high material costs and strong political opposition. The article argues that the effectiveness of the speech lies less in the presentation of isolated arguments than in its capacity to progressively close the field of questioning. At the level of discursive rationality, controversy is transformed into proof of national maturity, political choice into historical necessity, open time into oriented continuity, dissent into affective consensus, and deliberation into authoritative decision. At the level of symbolic foundation, the interiorization of the capital is presented as a geopolitical act of recentring, an identitarian synthesis of national diversity, and the fulfillment of a historical destiny. The convergence of these movements produces an effect of naturalization through which Brasília ceases to be perceived as a contingent response and comes to operate as a historically stabilized presupposition of the country’s intelligibility. From a Meyerian perspective, the article highlights the decisive role of language in transforming contingent political decisions into stabilized responses, capable of erasing the space of interrogation and reconfiguring the horizon of what can be thought.