Marsafi’s Eight Words lacks exterior structure and authoritative definitions

Evidence

Perhaps the first thing that one notices about a work like Eight Words is that it is not ‘organised’, in the way we expect of a text and especially of a text addressing an urgent political crisis. The book has no table of contents – no structure that might seem to stand outside the text itself – and offers no straightforward authoritative definitions of the words it treats, but seems to wander through all the associations each word evokes, in a way that seems disorganised and even badly written. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 448

Categorization

• SEED: The absence of a table of contents as a marker of a different epistemology of text — could support an essay on how textual form encodes assumptions about meaning.