Praise of love and violence: an approach to the affective rhetoric of Cambiemos

Abstract

In this article, we propose to address some of the central aspects of the political-affective rhetoric that characterized the discursive configuration of Cambiemos (2015-2019).  For this, we will take two specific scenes: the praise of the police officer Luis Chocobar in early 2018; and the exhibition, earlier this year, of a gigantography of Romeo and Juliet as a tribute to ‘Valentine’s Day’. In the first case, it is about the agent that killed Juan Pablo Kukoc and  gave rise to the 'Chocobar doctrine'; a doctrine which enabled the easy trigger and prompted police violence; while, in the second case, it is the symbol of romantic love –heterosexual- that the government used as part of its celebration of ‘love’. As we will show in the paper, both scenes are significant to understand the affective ambivalence manifested by the macrista narrative: love and hate as two sides of the same political practice and rhetoric that operated through a logic of segregation and exclusion. Therefore, from the framework of Sara Ahmed's theory of affections, and from the discursive analysis of these two episodes, the objective of our paper is to understand the affective economy that sustained and configured the contours of this political discourse.