Agritoxins versus Pesticides: Reading Notes about Polemic and Discursive Amemory

Abstract

In this article, we take as an object of study, on the one hand, excerpts from Bill 6299 of 2002 - PL 6299-2002 - known as the Agritoxin Law, authored by Blairo Maggi, the Minister of Agriculture during President Michel Temer’s administration, and, on the other, the polemic ensuing from the recent passage of this bill, whose goal is to loosen the criteria for approval and risk analysis and to propose changes in the denominations that are currently used to refer to agritoxins, by the Special Committee in the Lower House. In order to discuss the latter objective, we have taken segments of the texts that circulated in multiple Brazilian media questioning the approval of the above-cited project, referring to it as the Poison Bill. We have anchored our work in the contributions of Ruth Amossy’s theory on the argumentative character of polemic and also in Marie-Anne Paveau’s approaches to the relations between language and moral, especially with regard to the concept of discursive amemory.