Os sentidos de soberania no discurso político de Sílvio Romero: entre a dicotomia do estrangeiro e a interdição do intelectual na Primeira República

Abstract

The main purpose of this research is to understand, in Sílvio Romero's speeches uttered between 1900 and 1902, the constitution of national identity in the face of the representation of foreigners based on the notion of “sovereignty”. During this period, Silvio Romero presented two bills in the Chamber of Deputies proposing constitutional changes regarding the organization of the Armed Forces and the granting of vacant land to foreigners. Despite his background in law, the bills were deemed unconstitutional. Along with the notoriety of this scientific production, analyzes focused on Silvio Romero’s political discourse were not found. This discovery justifies the importance of this research. The analyses are included in the theoretical domain of Discourse Analysis of French filiation (DA) articulated with the discursive studies of M. Foucault, based on an interpretive qualitative and interdisciplinary methodology. The corpus of the research is constituted from the materiality classified by the Arquivo Nacional (2005) as a textual document and composed of the historical records of Silvio Romero’s pronouncements in his legislative work. This research seeks to answer the question: how does the political subject produce the meaning of sovereignty in his political discourse? Thus, starting from the guiding question of the analysis, it is proposed to evaluate the research hypothesis: the sense of sovereignty proposed by the political subject is the result of a reaction of the intellectual subject to attempts to control and interdict his ideas. Based on the interpretation of the results, the relations of power, knowledge and identity in the legislative practice of the political subject revealed. The results indicate that the two projects were constitutive one and only strategy against the“foreign threat” in the subject political intellectual’s perspective. This, in turn, indicates a dichotomous representation of foreigner for which sought approval based on the space of political intellectual. The subject built the meanings of sovereignty in the internal and external dimensions based on conditions of presence or absence of foreign “danger”. The analysis reveals, including, a existence of a new order of production of the truth that is not considered the intellectual a safe source of political and legal knowledge. This is the origin of the intellectual’s resistance, observed in your inquiry to the interdictions imposed, using a strict judgment about the use of the Portuguese language by his opponents.