The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer (Semiotext(e) / Intervention)

A series of reflections surveying the events of an ailing country traversed by civil war on multiple fronts.

What is it to be Black in America? It is to be constantly given unsolicited advice on how to run your life by people of all stripes, cultures, races, and opinions, so that the message is, by its very design, inconsistent with itself. However, there is one common feature that unites them all, besides their arrogant insistence to respond to what no one has asked of them: you can be sure that not one of these philistines has read—let alone understood—a single line of Plato. It is with this guiding insight that the author seeks to think his own material existence and resolves that philosophy must implicate itself in the utter demise of the alienated and oppressive wasteland in which he has been thrown.

Idris Robinson is a philosopher and writer from the New York hinterlands. For over a decade, he has written extensively on crisis, revolt, and political violence. He is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at Texas State University.