Meaning, Displacement, and Materiality:

Engaged Readings of What Is Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The work What is Discourse Analysis (2025), by Fábio Ramos Barbosa Filho, constitutes a theoretical gesture of listening, displacement, and critical formulation. This review follows that path, highlighting how the author articulates the materialist tradition, especially through Althusser and Pêcheux, with a form of listening implicated by Psychoanalysis. Divided into six chapters, the book offers a reading committed to historicity, ideology, and the opacity of language. Concepts such as event, metaphor, syntax, disidentification, and rumor are treated as operators that reveal the ideological effects inscribed in discursive materialities. Engaging with contemporary themes such as racism, memory, and violence, Barbosa Filho proposes an analysis that resists the fixation of meaning and embraces incompleteness as a constitutive force. The review is also implicated in this gesture, assuming reading as a situated production of meaning, traversed by language. Thus, the work asserts itself as a field of critical formulation, where subject, discourse, and history intertwine in a process of crossing.