Becoming-abject as a punctum of political resistance: abjection textures in the images from Silent Book by Miguel Rio Branco
Becoming-abject as a punctum of political resistance: abjection textures in the images from Silent Book by Miguel Rio Branco

Summary/Abstract: In this article I analyze the images on the photographic book Silent Book by the Brazilian photographer Miguel Rio Branco with the objective to understand how the photographer appropriates from an aesthetic of abjection to constitute the notion of becoming-abject (in dialogue with Deleuze, Guattari, Kristeva and Bataille), in a way that punctum (Barthes) in these photographs can be interpreted as a form of political resistance (Rancière). The book is composed by 77 photos, diagrammed in diptychs which, at times, become triptychs, and constantly alternate their relational meaning. The quasi-abstraction of the pictures in Silent Book directs our gaze to its visual aspect and, from there, to the divagation of the non-linear narratives that permeate them. Their warm and dark colors and, especially, rough textures take the spectator to the edge of interpretation and establish these images at the limit of the imaginary of abjection: the decadent ruin, the eroticism, the dirt, the horror, the fatigue, the death. In this context, the abject becomes a form of highlighting what before was placed aside, promoting the necessary perception of the different and of otherness, as an alternative to the overload of positivity and individualism in contemporaneity, as pointed out by philosopher Byung-Chul Han, constituting, therefore, a form of political resistance.

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