On January 18, 1963, the UCLA excavation uncovered a letter written in Old Nubian. At its present state it preserves the entire height and most probably the entire width. The publication of the letter was entrusted to Sergio Donadoni, but remained in draft form, like the rest of the publication on Askut prepared by Alexander Badawy. Together with…[Read more]

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei investigates the politics of Anri Sala’s work and its relation to the legacies of communism.

This article treats a set of subject cross-referencing morphemes in the medieval Nilo-Saharan language Old Nubian, traditionally called “personal endings.” Based on an analysis of their syntactic distribution and morphology, I argue that this set can be best described as a set of subject clitics, originally deriving from phonologically reduced pro…[Read more]

The toponym ⲡⲟⲩⲣⲅⲟⲩⲛⲇⲓ was first recorded in a Greek–Old Nubian graffito on a wall of the Church of the Archangel Raphael in Tamit,…

The island of Dorginarti is situated south of Buhen in Northern Su- dan and has now been completely submerged in Lake Nasser…

In the opening essay of Conditions (C), “The (Re)Turn of Philosophy Itself,” French philosopher Alain Badiou claims that today we labor under a post-metaphysical “paralysis” of philosophy for which it appears that “history has entered the— perhaps interminable—era of its closure.” (3) This paralysis and concomitant “malaise” of philosophy aro…[Read more]

There is a question of philology. “Where are you going to?” Socrates asks his lover Phaedrus. “I am going for a walk outside the walls”, he answers. While walking, Phaedrus tells Socrates, a “philological man”, about the conversation about love, the logos erotikos, a language of love and love for language that he had with Lysias. “Plato’s ‘p…[Read more]

I would like to o er you today the beginnings of a meditation on the word yes, on the gesture of affirmation. We should take great care not to con ate affirmation and saying yes – saying it once, twice, or many times over – and in which language? – all too easily. As I will try to elucidate, there is an abyss between saying yes and affirming that…[Read more]

Politics shares with philosophy its attempts at systematization. What in politics is o en lamented as a progressive bureaucratization and obfuscation of revolutionary fervor is presented in philosophy as the maturation of a system, metaphysical, ontological, or otherwise. This slow process of maturation that supposedly takes place throughout a…[Read more]

Formulating a theory of signification doesn’t seem to be one of philosophy’s current preoccupations. Whether suffering from a malaise after the so-called linguistic turn, or placing its hopes on the algorithms of the future to figure out language’s “emergent properties,” the thinking of the sign seems to have lost most of its vigor. Neverthel…[Read more]