WHO SPEAKS IN THE APOCALYPSE? The meaning production in the soap opera Apocalypse regarding religious and scientific discourses

Abstract

The soap opera is one of the greatest media portal with great prominence in our country. The strong influence of this artistic form highlights its role as an agent of cultural mediation, which many areas of knowledge have studied it. Psychoanalysis uses art as reference constantly, despite that there is something in art that is irreducible to the symbolic and it is in this hiatus that we will place ourselves thinking the unfolding of entertainment practices in the ways of living and signifying social relations in the midst of a new technological era. We looked at the tension found in the novel related to the production of meanings of certain speeches, using it for our reflections. In The Triumph of Religion (2005), Jacques Lacan addresses religious and scientific discourse. We understood as the problematic of this article the form of these speeches and how they operate in the soap opera's narrative. The soap opera Apocalipse captured our attention by bringing a technological reinterpretation of the biblical apocalypse and how it would happen nowadays. Supported by the principles of French Materialist Discourse Analysis, we observed in our analysis the resumption of pre-built and transverse discourses questioning the place of science and fable. From the psychoanalytic perspective, we observed the cooptation of scientific discourse by religious discourse in its standard form and in its reverse, showing the triumph of religious discourse as pointed out by Lacan.