Becoming a bookworm for a minor editing
arts, literature, philosophy, books, publishing.
Becoming-silverfish: for a minor-publisher” expresses a desire to think and provoke thought about book publishing, choosing the transformations and lines of flight assemblaged in the editorial daily life. Based on practical experience with the publisher Quixote+Do, the project transmutes into a cartographic research-intervention grounded in the philosophy of immanence of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
We explore an exhaustion of the publisher's body in the face of economic crises, monopolist market pressures, and the hostile scenario of the pandemic period in Brazil, factors that contributed to a closure of the company's original formation and to its transformation into another body. The concept of minor editing emerges, a practice that operates within instability, inconclusiveness, and the deterritorialization of hegemonic publishing standards.
The theoretical core adopts the figure of the silverfish (Lepisma saccharina) as an aesthetic-political sign, in a becoming-other. The becoming-silverfish merges the insect's literal appetite for paper and glue with the visceral desire of editors and readers to digest originals, destabilize common sense, and create the book as an “event”. Under the method of cartography, the research rejects traditional methodological rigidity in favor of an open attitude that accompanies living pathways and the engendering of the studied reality itself. The notion of fomeridade [hunger-driven intensity] is also introduced — an active, ethical, and revolutionary hunger for language that resists the captures of capital and acts in a nomadic manner in favor of bibliodiversity and subjective ecologies.