Remember the 90s. Commemoration and promotion of oblivion of menemism in the recent enthymematic speech

Abstract

From a socio-semiotic perspective, the analysis of a corpus of media and political discourses around the figure of Carlos Menem and Argentina in the 1990s is proposed in this paper. Following the angenotian premise of seeking in the social production of meaning that which runs through all the discourses of a particular state of society, we compare texts of an enthymematic nature from a cultural magazine with digital circulation and some statements by leaders of right-wing party groups to propose that in the doxa on the recent argentine past it is configured by a discursive hegemony where menemism is thematized as a project of reconciliation of the society of its time. On the other hand, we argue that it would be feasi- ble to link the emergence of figures from the new argentine right to a slow, partial but clear process of social rehabilitation of menemism in contemporary public debate. This displacement of the frontiers of what can be said and what is acceptable, we will maintain, allows to postulate programmatic components inspired by the neoliberalism of the 1990s as desirable for the present situation.