Dimensions of violence in language

articulating scenarios and perspectives

Abstract

This article aims at discussing dimensions of violence in three empirical scenarios in which physical and symbolic violence differently surfaced: an account of a female victim of violence about her attempt to press charges about threats made by her then husband; the comments by a businessman about the lack of value of the lives of favela residents in the context of the Covid-19 pandemics; a newspaper cover displaying the head of the former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff on fire. The article builds on the concepts of scales, communicability and indexicality in order to render intelligible the ways in which violence was perceived and framed in the first context; in addition to how it virally spread in the second, and to how it participated in the semiotization and contextualization of an image in the third. Methodologically, the paper combines ethnographic and documental approaches, and applies them differently in each empirical context. In addition to providing a situated discussion of these three manifestations of violence, we point to modes of resistance to violence, some of which are inscribed in the very production of reflexive activity about the manifestation and effects of violence.