Where did Milei's votes come from? The configuration of a disruptive enunciation device we did not see coming

Abstract

In this essay-like analysis, we propose to address the case of Javier Milei, as an enunciator who emerged in the political sphere, establishing his legitimacy as a non-politician. Milei's emergence disrupted the established order of politics, understood as the set of practices and institutions through which a given order is created (Mouffe, 2011). The proposed approach will begin with an eclectic anchor in the field of discourse analysis and will pay attention to the emergence of this "new" enunciator in the political sphere: Javier Milei. This concomitant implication is to investigate the configurations assumed by his enunciative device and the ways in which it is inscribed or differentiated from the exclusive (and standardized) enunciative models of political discourse. It is within this framework that we question the architectures that underpin Milei's discourses and whether these can be posited within the so-called "new" right, as political manifestations that have gained ground globally. However, these irruptions are strained at the thresholds of established logics and the postulations of faces that challenge these sediments. Traverso would define these processes as "skin changes" (2018) of the so-called ‘new right’, which, in this refurbishment of strategies, embrace (and co-opt) elements that are certainly dispersed in the social fabric but, which, at the same time, are contingently articulated with rather regressive elements.