Luto:

presença (discurso) ausência (corpo)

Abstract

This essay aims to present and reflect on issues related to death and mourning in old age, seeking to understand the meaningful effects that resonate in photographs dealing with the theme published on Instagram, an online social network. The intention is to highlight the discursive materiality of the body in the socio-historical and ideological process of symbolic textualization about death and its effects on feeling and meaning in the digital space. This construction will be based on the possible discursive relationship between Pecheutiana Discourse Analysis theoretical-methodological and Psychoanalysis. As a closing effect, it was understood that, in the analyzed materialities, death, mourning or what was called the presence-absence of the lost object, casts effects of meaning that are constituted by exteriority - historicity and interdiscourse - evidencig the sense of absence that is discursively represented in the discourses of the subjects who are still alive. The body that is no longer alive becomes represented by absence, that is, it is taken up by affective and discursive memory, which resists/exists discursively when it is symbolized, thus, presence (discourse)-absence (body) points to a given constitutive relationship of the grieving subjects, which moves the work of memory, bringing into play historicity and interdiscourse, that is, exteriority. Therefore, the effects of meaning indicate that the presence (discourse)-absence (body) signify, which opens up space for symbolic work that operates in the language of visual materialities.