illiteratus.com
Unauthorised Translations. Fractured Philology.
Month: December 2025
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The Retreat of Reality: On Agamben’s What is Real? (2018) by Justin Loke For much of Western thought, reality was understood as something necessary, of necessity: things happened for reasons, and even if humans did not yet know those reasons, they were assumed to exist. This view goes back to Aristotle, who described reality in…
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“ […] A medieval glossary explains the meaning of the neologism dementicare, which was beginning to substitute the more literary oblivisci in common usage, as follows: dementicatis: oblivioni traditdistis. The forgotten is not simply cancelled or left aside: it is handed over to oblivion. The pattern of this unformulable tradition was set out by Hölderlin…
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“These bonds are shackle freeWrapped in lust and lunacyTiny touch of jealousyThese bonds are shackle free” – Placebo Luna, lunes, Monday, and lunacy all trace back to the Latin lūna, “moon,” an old word that shaped both calendars and metaphors. Spanish lunes descends directly from diēs Lūnae, “the day of the Moon,” while English Monday…
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“It is not because life and death are the most sacred things that sacrifice contains killing; on the contrary, life and death became the most sacred things because sacrifices contained killing. (In this sense, nothing explains the difference between anitquity and the modern world better than the fact that for the first, the destruction of…
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The word caesuras comes from the Latin caesura, which means “a cutting” or “a break.” It is built from the verb caedere, meaning to cut, to strike, even to kill. The term Caesarean section is commonly believed to come from the birth of Julius Caesar, but this is almost certainly a legend. The real origin…
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I often see roadkill on the streets of Singapore, small animals, mostly birds, often pigeons or Javan myna. They’re not just struck dead, but slowly obliterated by the endless stream of cars, until all that remains is a dark, indistinct smear on the asphalt. As a child, I was once told there’s a superstition about…
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Whenever we speak about a person or a thing, we unknowingly perform two moves. First, we name it (“Katie,” “this person here”), which singles it out. Second, we say something about it (“she is kind,” “she is tall”), which assumes that there is already a stable “someone” underneath our words. Aristotle Aristotle noticed this and…
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