Abstract/resumen/resumé: This article investigates how Brazilian Discourse Analysis, particularly through the work of Eni Orlandi, draws on the essay form to challenge language studies from the perspective of ideology. The notion of latency is adopted as a key interpretative concept to understand the discursive gesture that traverses her writing — a writing that rejects the fixation of essential meanings onto the objects it examines, focusing instead on the ways discourse generates meaning processes. In doing so, it allows the pulsation of history to emerge, along with different senses of colonization — both foundational and those yet to be experienced.
Keywords/palavras clave/mots-clés: Discourse Analysis. Essay. Latency. Colonization.