A POÉTICA DO CONTÁGIO EM "O TRIBUNAL DA QUINTA-FEIRA", DE MICHEL LAUB

Abstract

In this article, Michel Laub's novel “O tribunal da quinta-feira” was analyzed from the perspective of HIV/AIDS and its metaphorical insertion in the literary landscape of the 21st century. In view of the historical traumas produced by the pandemic during the 1980s, the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome was hardly represented in the space of canonical literary fiction, nor in the form of a metaphorical device in the arts. Because it is linked to dissident bodies in society - mainly gays, black Haitians, sex workers – it is possible to understand why there is an abjection ballast characterizing the nature of the disease, a reason that would limit it in the field of metaphors. Therefore, unlike other diseases, such as tuberculosis or syphilis, which are widely used dramatically in the literature, HIV/AIDS faces a certain poetic disuse and a certain repulsion in symbolic domains. Revisiting the history of the epidemic from a seropositive character in contemporary times, Laub's novel presents a renewed viral metaphor in which the organic (the body virus) and the cyber (viralization of messages on the network) converge, allowing another perception of the disease and of the communication processes on the Internet. Through this confluence, called here the contagion poetics, we discussed themes such as gender, dissident sexualities, abjection, contamination, the virtual world.