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Full Description
"Will you not memorize a little poetry to halt the slaughter?" the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote. Darwish's poetic statement points to world-evacuating and genocidal violences - in a triangulation of Palestine, Iraq, and the American settler state - as his language recalls us to a sonority in utterance and acts of refusal in collective form. Through readings of Arabic and Arab poetry, art, translation, and philosophy, Jeffrey Sacks illumines an indetermined, non-accumulative, non-propertied manner of lingual doing - across post-Ottoman topographies and states, and in excess of any single language - where language is a practice in sociality, the social is indistinct from the ontological, and being is a poetic mode - what this book calls "poeticality."
Poeticality studies the Lebanese-American poet and painter Etel Adnan, the Iraqi poet and translator Khālid al-Maʿālī, philosophers in the Arabic peripatetic tradition, and writings of Karl Marx, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, and others, to demonstrate a sense of form wholly other than what is advanced in self-determined social existence, linguistic self-understanding, and philosophical self-representation - a manner of address and a social pose, which Sacks summarizes under the heading "settler life."
Settler life - a form of life, a practice of reading, and an asymmetric distribution of social destruction - asserts itself as a generalized and regulating attack upon Black and Indigenous life, and upon all forms of non-white, non-Christian, non-heteronormative existence. "Everything is in the language we use," the Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier has written. This book - learning from Long Soldier's observation and with Darwish's sense of the poetic - affirms the demand for Indigenous sovereignty, in Palestine, in Turtle Island, and elsewhere, a demand which, through the collective acts occasioned in it, decomposes and deposes all sovereign forms and all stately legalities, in refusal of settler life.
Contents
Preface xv
Introduction:
Poeticality 1
1 Settler Life 19
Reading Life, 21
Property, 27
Pacification, 38
Translation, 48
Politick Societies, 53
2 Anontological Form 66
Patience, 68
Mere Being, 73
Demonstration, 83
Insubstantiality, 92
Common Things, 97
Necessity, 101
Generosity, 112
3 Insurgence: A Poetics of Things 118
Reverberation, 121
Inessential Gathering, 130
Language, 140
Poetic Being, 148
Insurgent Life, 165
Notes 175
Works Cited 247
Index 273
Plates follow page 92
