• Peter Gelderloos: “Geopolitics for 2024 on the probabilities of state power or revolution”
    “We rarely know how to achieve any continuity from one generation to the next within the alienation and scarcity of capitalism, so we commit the same mistakes again and again. And under the colonial spirituality of rationalism we have forgotten that the real world cannot exist without imaginary worlds. We let capitalism do all our imagining for us until our imaginations become atrophied, so we can no longer turn to revolution as a meaningful concept because barely anyone knows how to imagine a revolution anymore. Once we get through the early moments of revolution in which we can carry… Continue reading Peter Gelderloos: “Geopolitics for 2024 on the probabilities of state power or revolution”
  • Sahar Delijani on the Legacies of the Arab Spring
    “The revolution in Tunisia was born on the ashes of Mohammad Bouazizi’s body. The revolution in Egypt on the broken face of the 28-year-old Khaleh Said beaten to death by security forces for posting a photo on social media. The revolts in Syria erupted when little boys were arrested and tortured by the police for writing anti-regime graffiti. The revolution in Libya when Fethi Tarbel, a human rights lawyer, was imprisoned. The revolts in Iran when a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Zhina Amini, was murdered by Morality Police for wearing her hijab too loosely. The sparks are endless, and… Continue reading Sahar Delijani on the Legacies of the Arab Spring
  • Jean Vioulac: “Revolution and Destruction: The Fascist Obstacle”
    “The revolution is not an ideal or a utopia; it is the fundamental movement of our time. For two centuries, private life and society, art and religion, technology and science, everything has been revolutionised.”
  • For Alfredo M. Bonanno (1927-2023)
    “That is why we are, and define ourselves, insurrectionalist anarchists. Not because we think the solution is the barricades — the barricades could be a tragic consequence of choices that are not our own — but we are insurrectionalists because we think that anarchist action must necessarily face very serious problems.”
  • “The Revolutionary Temper” (2023) by Robert Darnton reviewed
    Darnton “suggests that between the end of the war of the Austrian succession in 1748 and the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the French population underwent a series of convulsions, some as molten as others were icy, which resulted in a subtle but powerful molecular shift.” 

Vassilis Lambropoulos

C. P. Cavafy Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan

This site is a book-length scholarly study of political hubris in modern tragedy, specifically, the self-destruction of revolution from Romantic to Postmodern theater and beyond.  It includes original scholarship as well as news, comments, and announcements.  It remains a work in progress in that new material is regularly added to it and existing material is revised and reconfigured.

Parallel blog of further reflections on solidarity and collaborative culture