One of the joys of reading is the way it stretches and challenges. In this case, I was overwhelmed by the creative use of words. Words were manipulated, mangled, taken apart and put back together in ways I had to stop and think about. If you have an itch in your brain you can't quit seem to scratch, try reading something just beyond your current understanding. It is such a frustrating and fulfilling experience. I am doubly curious about the translation process. The use of vocabulary is so precise, I want to know how closely the author and translator collaborated and if the creative use of English was inspired by the way words are put together in other languages. The author is pulling ideas from a variety of places, many of which were originally in a language other than English so this seems likely but I am just guessing. Did I understand everything I read? No. Did I spend time looking up words and ideas throughout the reading process? Yes. And I feel like my poetry in particular has already improved from the experience. I highly recommend this for the exposure to vocabulary and ideas you won't encounter anywhere else. Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the eARC.

Dense and somewhat esoteric—really took my grand delusions about slowly getting good at reading philosophy (& Co.) and smooshed them into something indistinct and sticky that you scrape off the bottom of the paper basket—but fascinating: For an Ecology of Images calls to consider the life of images, their economics (that is, 'housekeeping' and utility) and ecological relations.

(And, as Szendy is wont to point out, with the philosopher's want to critically eye language and vivisect etymology, 'ecology' means an 'economy of organisms' as Haeckel coined it — and 'economy of organisms' has already a common articulation, one of God-given teleology and human use, reaching to and before Linnaeus.

He regards the image first as something organic, which emerged from the world beyond use and is never truly unliving - and its development as something recursive, which swallows itself. There is something definitely Bergsonian in the ways Szendy regards time: as something which devours and collapses back on itself, future folding into past folding into the present and vice versa (implying that I understand Bergson, which I don't.)

When drawing on actual biological evidence, some of the relations Szendy sees in development and evolutions feel, to me, kind of sloppy for the sake of the poeticism of movement in-between the material and the metaphorical.

(Though, damn, is he good at the poeticism.)

There might(?) be a problematic, contradictory aspect to that biological portion of the book's argument. One proceeds naturally a priori a quite anthropocentric interpretation of natural phenomena — I can't help but feel that any attempt to show a liberation away from anthropocentric economy is inherently built in mud. For example, he takes as given how the image of mimicry in stick insects (animal imitating plant matter, a "lower", more "primitive", "immobile" life form) is a king of retrograde movement, a freeze frame. (But, of course, a plant is more primitive only in the supremacist logic of animals.)

P.S. There is a potential angle of approach when speaking of organic life and economics (etymologically, "housekeeping") with "housekeeping genes" - the term for the set of genes which are constantly continuously expressed in all cells as a matter of the basic necessary functions as life. As of the nature of what they are, housekeeping genes tend to be pretty much the same throughout wildly distantly related organisms. (There is a strong incentive not to mess around with the recipe for, say, making proteins because 99,99999% of all results lead to goop soup where the entropy-rope-dancing water bag of your progeny was supposed to be.) I don't know what to do with that simple linguistic similarity, but I'm pointing it out, because I think there might be something to be cooked here.

This was an interesting read, and it's short, but it's very academic. Images constantly inundate us, and this is an attempt to analyze those images and how we process them. There are examples to point out different kinds of images, how they differ, and how we think about and categorize all those images. I liked how the illustrations were used to explain the concepts.
Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this.

As much as I hate doing this, I've DNF'd not far into this one. I was anticipating something MUCH less dense and accessible for the layperson. The images are certainly beautiful, just not enough to make me read pages that are more academic than anecdotal or actionable.

I don't think this is completely the book's fault, it is more that we don't make the pair I thought we would. I'm not the intended audience for this, but still really appreciate the opportunity to experience Pete Szendy's writing.

Because I DNF'd, I will not be including my rating on Goodreads and am giving a 3 on NetGalley since we're forced to give a rating.

{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, Peter Szendy, and Verso Books for the eARC in exchange for my honest review!}