Politics of haunting: bolsonarista populism as a production of uncanny doubles

Abstract

The article investigates the relationship between opinion management on social networks and the artifices of Bolsonaro’s ultra-right-wing populism in Brazil. The Nietzschean-inspired genealogical ethos directed the empirical research around the meanings of the word freedom as found in Twitter posts collected on September 7, 2021, the date of a noisy demonstration — with a coup-like character — in support of the government. By analyzing the data produced by the web scraping technique, we identified an important bolsonarista tactic: the production of doubles of words traditionally associated with the democratic lexicon. More than eroding the meaning of such words, such strategy allows what could be called a process of haunting them, inoculating estrangement (das Unheimliche) in their previously crystallized meanings. As an effect, a deliberate production of instability and insecurity is insinuated for manipulating sad passions as a vector of a population’s biopolitics.

Keywords
populism; bolsonarism; biopolitics; social media; Unheimliche