GROTESQUE REPRESENTATIONS OF A FORMER PRESIDENT

SEMIODISCURSIVE ISSUES

Abstract

This article investigates the aesthetics of the grotesque used in images of former president Jair Bolsonaro published in Facebook groups, based on discursive and tensive semiotic theories, demonstrating its relevance for understanding this aesthetic as part of human semiosis and as part of social practice of meaning. Based on the generative path of meaning and the tensive mode/style of the text, we demonstrate that the grotesque images, representing the former president as animal, creature, specter of death and deranged leader, can be considered a genre modalized by the tensive rhetoric of the event. In Bolsonaro's images, a producer/enunciator seeks to manipulate an interpretant/enunciatee through a text with mythological bases that seeks the intensity of the sensitive and the supranatural. The grotesque, understood as a counter (counter-program) of an ideological program, becomes a social criticism marked by intensity.