Why would someone writing an article in English not include an English translation? I have zero idea what this sentence means.
In all cases it seems like the British have held on to those a bit longer than Americans.
In this instance, you ought to be able to pick it out by context, thanks to cognates and two famous works by two famous figures being included. "Méridien de sang" can only be McCarthy' Blood Meridian; "la Monadologie de Leibniz" can only be Leibniz' Monadology—the philosophy of monads being the thing he's second most famous for in the English world, after co-developing calculus and before noble genealogy. "un double movement" is almost identical to English. From there, your guess at the meaning, given the lead-in to it, will likely be correct.
You think this is bad, you should see what they do in math.
I think we run in different circles. Despite having three university degrees and owning thousands of books that I have read, I’ve never heard of either of these books and am just slightly aware of Leibniz, though that might be explained by my never having taken a class on calculus.
tLdr; I still don’t have a clue since I don’t possess enough requisite knowledge in the required domain space.
If it makes you feel any better, I may as well be badly afflicted by dyslexia when I try to read a mathematical statement with more than a couple simple terms.
[0] I'm digging way back so this might be a little off, but fundamentally it's a solution to the Problem of Evil[1]: Leibniz puts us each in a "windowless monad" of a universe—sort of individual pocket universes—such that all the people we interact with are actually automatons of a sort. In this way, a person can do evil (i.e. sin still exists), but not actually inflict it on anyone else, if that makes sense. Meanwhile, bad things happening to you in your personal monad aren't actually evil because... I dunno, it's been a while so I don't remember exactly, but I'm guessing it comes down to "God works in mysterious ways". Basically, he replaces true causality with a kind of divine harmonic dance of actually-not-affecting-one-another things and people that make up what we call "reality". Nb. his actual argument is far less dumb than I'm making it seem.
[1] The Problem of Evil can be summed up in the child's question: "if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil (apparently—that part will matter a ton for some people who try to address this) exist?" Lots and lots of theologians and philosophers over many centuries took a crack at the seemingly-simple question—and in fact, one of Leibniz' notions, that the world one experiences is "the best of all possible worlds", was famously parodied in Voltaire's Candide, which is another way someone with a humanities background might have become familiar with his philosophy.
Doesn't this depend on your definition of "created"? It seems this presupposes certain things like ex nihilo creation (matter out of nothing) and god being able to create people (i.e., people are not co-existent with god).
In Leibniz' case, his work on that problem just happens to be probably his second-most-famous work at all, and better-known than most such efforts, even into our era of atheistic modernism (in part because of the Voltaire connection I mentioned—I'm sure Candide is far more widely-read than anything Leibniz wrote)
In the case of social media, the author appears to be arguing that on the one hand it is not some "special place" that is distinct from other communication networks - many of which have existed before man himself did. e.g. you can see a natural continuum from plants communicating with each other via airborne rhizobacteria -> animals communicating with each other with sound -> people talking -> telegraph -> telephone -> email -> social media. So in some sense it's just a continuation of an existing trend of expanding the domain of communication.
On the other hand, it is not like previous methods of communication because it is subject to algorithmic amplification and perverse "attention economy" incentives. For example, the best way for Twitter or Facebook to make money is to show you things that piss you off. The best way to be popular on Instagram is to live a completely fake life. In fact, the author argues that the only way to properly engage with social media is by treating it as a game - e.g. shitposting. In that sense social media is very different from pre-existing means of communication.
In a way I feel like this is indicative of one of the points of the essay: the expectation that authors today need to dumb down and distill their work into cereal for the lowest common denominators in order to sell more copies.
Granted, there's a fine line between gesturing to your intellectual forebears and just being an obnoxious prat, but I don't think the author crossed that line for the worse. Time to brush up on your french?