Laboring images, reparing the visible

The politics of image as a reparative practice

Abstract

This paper of speculative content proposes an approximation between the notions of politics of image, formulated by Jacques Rancière, and reparative practice, by Eve Sedgwick. We affirm that the politics of image, by freeing itself from a dimension of denouncement and from the prescriptive content oriented to cause indignation in the viewer, can be qualified as a reparative practice. The work presents two movements: the first seeks to establish relations between what Sedgwick considers a paranoid position based on the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and the representative regime of the image described by Rancière. The works explores then the proposition of the politics of image as a reparative practice, reflecting on the ways in which the image can be open to indeterminacy, dissent and other forms of organization of the visible, the audible and the sayable. As a result of these two movements, we present a brief analysis of the film Os últimos românticos do mundo (Henrique Arruda, 2020), a queer work that produces a gesture of reparation granting visual pleasures and producing a temporary fissure in what has traditionally been conceived as a political image.