The challenge of naming the pandemic in Argentine political discourse

From the invisible enemy to infectadura

Abstract

This article analyzes, based on a corpus of political and journalistic speeches that circulated between March and November 2020 in Argentina, the denominative stakes of political speech to designate the measures to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. The political names with which the pandemic event and the policies associated to it were designated, are objects of discourse resulting from a nominative act, which is an instituting act. Relatively stable, metadiscoursive and controversial nominal syntagmas that go beyond the media, political names inscribe historical-political events in short, medium and long term, and thus allow them to be fixed and projected on a temporal horizon. From the war discourse to the medical-scientific discourse, from metaphores of confinement to the dictatorial allusions, from quarantine to the Preventive and Compulsory Social Isolation and the Social, Preventive and Compulsory Distancing, the political discourse circulated more than one name trying to give it sense and thickness to an unprecedented collective experience.