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drraytay's review against another edition
I have never felt so stupid while reading a book in my life. The first half was easy enough to understand but the second half ate me alive. There were large chunks of text so academic I was having flashbacks to learning how to read medical journals. If I was a Scientologist, it would take me YEARS to clear enough words to fully understand this book. I am not exaggerating.
The author casually uses words like aleatory and elegiac. Ontological is used seven times. There’s an essay in this book in which the author rejects simplicity in writing and, let me tell you, he has succeeded. If you can decipher the word soup of these two passages, I give you a standing ovation.
“There is no ontological difference between the dumpster and me. We are mimetically liminal, both purged of ethical matter. To be young and in love in a dumpster, in the constitutive outside of the present, is a manifestation of melancholia.”
“Utopia isn't a feeling but rather the banished shape of an ur-feeling. It is in one valence submerged in an ethics of privacy. Invisibilized, utopia is against a sovereignty of the senses. In a more politically rousing valence, it is incommensurable with publicness, being instead an unownable thing that barks back at the interpellative shout of property.”
My spell check didn’t even understand three words in that last quote. Google barely got that I was searching for the meaning of ur-feeling and instead gave me articles about understanding your feelings.
I am by no means shitting on this book. I think many of the essays are powerful and vital to understanding the queer Native experience. I’m just not smart enough to understand it all.
The author casually uses words like aleatory and elegiac. Ontological is used seven times. There’s an essay in this book in which the author rejects simplicity in writing and, let me tell you, he has succeeded. If you can decipher the word soup of these two passages, I give you a standing ovation.
“There is no ontological difference between the dumpster and me. We are mimetically liminal, both purged of ethical matter. To be young and in love in a dumpster, in the constitutive outside of the present, is a manifestation of melancholia.”
“Utopia isn't a feeling but rather the banished shape of an ur-feeling. It is in one valence submerged in an ethics of privacy. Invisibilized, utopia is against a sovereignty of the senses. In a more politically rousing valence, it is incommensurable with publicness, being instead an unownable thing that barks back at the interpellative shout of property.”
My spell check didn’t even understand three words in that last quote. Google barely got that I was searching for the meaning of ur-feeling and instead gave me articles about understanding your feelings.
I am by no means shitting on this book. I think many of the essays are powerful and vital to understanding the queer Native experience. I’m just not smart enough to understand it all.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault, Sexual content, and Colonisation
Moderate: Suicide
Minor: Ableism
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