Unveiling institutions: How discourses disguise our word

Abstract

This book is part of the results of the research project "Cuerpo y metáfora en la construcción ideológica de las instituciones jurídicas y políticas" (PICT 2016-0534). It is also inspired by the debates that took place at the III Congreso Internacional "Instituciones e interdisciplina: alcances jurídicos, económicos y epistemológicos" that was held in the Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Jurídicas, Universidad Nacional de La Pampa (in the city of Santa Rosa, La Pampa, Argentina) during the 1st and 2nd August, 2019. Both, the research project and the congress received financing from the ANPCyT , Argentina. So, this book can be published thanks to a national public policy that promotes science and knowledge enhancement.These pages aim to present a short review about the discussion on the symbolic configuration of institutions that focus on how metaphors and discourses constitute a way of understanding the world that surrounds us. We intend to highlight the linguistic and discursive metaphorical formulation of legal and political institutions emphasizing the representation of the body as a focus of interest and cultural significance. By "institutions" we mean a partial ordering of man's life in society through a validity system and certain regulatory guidelines.Representing the body and its technologies builds up a notion of person and, therefore, the discursive configuration of institutions has a broad symbolic base centred on the body metaphor. We start from the idea that the social bond is based on an analogue constitution and both individuals and collective entities are linked to reality through social imaginary figures that each epistemological perspective constructs ideologically and with distinctive hermeneutics effectiveness. Preponderance of the body metaphor comes from solidarity between body and person, based on the characteristic epistemological and ideological principles of each particular historical moment.These pages present some ideas on a diachronic perspective about how institutions have been compared and assimilated to body figures in a way that they are constituted and understood form social imaginary. Also, we introduce a short review on our approach to metaphors and institutions in order to contrast different authors. We expect that this paper is useful to understand the following chapters that are based on the idea that discursive and symbolizing processes disguise our daily world and our daily interactions with institutions.