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On April 5th, 2019 at the University of Chicago, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a conversation, moderated by Pam Nogales, on the legacy of 1989 at its 11^th^ annual international convention. What follows is an edited transcript of the discussion. Robert Bird: I don’t know what more I have to say about the fall of communism than I said on the 20^th^ anniversary, so I dug out my presentation from then. [Read More]

Poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called “healthy-mindedness” looks. — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?… Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman, a rope over an abyss… What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under. [Read More]

“The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious…” — Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” “[T]here are moments in which theory is pushed on further by practice. But such a situation neither exists objectively today, nor does the barren and brutal practicism that confronts us here have the slightest thing to do with theory anyhow. [Read More]