Life & Wisdom Quote by Peter Sotos

A lot is packed into that offhand "Further", like a footnote that accidentally tells you the whole project. Sotos isn’t confessing a hobby; he’s flagging a compulsion: the desire to watch language do violence and then claim it was only description. "Obsessed" matters because it frames reading as a kind of fixation, not a neutral act. He’s not outside the machinery of rhetoric, diagnosing it. He’s inside it, wired to its distortions.

"Contorts" suggests language as a physical force, twisting reality until it fits a narrative. It’s an ugly verb: not persuasion, not interpretation, but deformation. Then he escalates: language doesn’t just misrepresent bodies; it "creates" them. That’s the knife. Bodies here aren’t simply anatomical; they’re social objects - the victim, the deviant, the innocent, the disposable - assembled out of descriptors, euphemisms, pornographic framing, police-report chill. The sentence implies that identity and harm can be manufactured through syntax and tone, that certain people become legible (and therefore targetable) only once a story gives them a shape.

The subtext is also self-incriminating. If language creates bodies, then the writer is complicit in creating the conditions under which bodies are imagined, judged, and consumed. Sotos’s work has long orbited taboo, voyeurism, and the ethics of representation; this line reads like both an artist statement and a warning label. It’s an insistence that words don’t merely talk about flesh - they can sculpt it, and they can leave fingerprints.