1 | Fall-Winter 2023

Editorial

There is no movement gathered here, just a circle of friends who have long sought an outlet for their unconventional opinions and tastes and not finding one have agreed to devote themselves to a long-term publishing enterprise.
Editors

Little Infinities

Considerations on the epochal significance of Nietzsche’s last writings on revolution, nihilism and the vocation of art. A review of Alain Badiou’s Nietzsche’s Antiphilosophie 1992-1993 (Domont: Fayard 2015).
Rick Dasenbrock

First hand observations of events and encounters from two literary conferences in the Pacific Northwest occasioning some concluding reflections on the decline of the West. What would Adorno have thought?
Odette Wong

An Old Bolshevik sets the record straight on “political capitalism” and certain progressive myths about American politics in these declining years of academic Marxism. A response to “Seven Theses on American Politics” by Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner, New Left Review.
Carmen Parmense

Weltmacht oder Untergang: the political philosophy of John J. Mearsheimer. A review of The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale UP, 2018) and The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001).
Ray Lester Fitzsimmons

A Catholic Harvard Law Professor proposes that the vast prerogatives of the modern administrative state can claim a pedigree going back to Blackstone and Aquinas. How plausible is his conception of our politico-legal regime and what coming structural transformations does his doctrine herald? A review of Common Good Constitutionalism by Adrian Vermeule (Cambridge: Polity, 2023).
Thomas Brannigan

A history of the modern Roman Catholic Church as a political institution from 1789 to the present. Decades after renouncing its earlier counter-revolutionary opposition to the heresies of modernism, what’s in store for this last pillar of the Old Regime? A review of Catholicism: a Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis by John T. McGreevey (New York: National Geographic Books, 2022).
Thomas Brannigan

An array of reflections from Left to Right on the archaic foundations of modern politics. What can this small current of modern French thought tell us about the historical significance of neo-liberalism and the shapes of future political communities? A review of The Anthropological Turn: French Thought after 1968 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2020).
Ray Lester Fitzsimmons

An aged Orientalist reflects on cultures of intoxication East and West, shares some of his experiences from his time with legendary psychonauts—Albert Hofmann, Ernst Jünger and Rudolf Gelpke—and nostalgically recalls his conservative revolutionary hopes for an Islamic Republic. Then the drugs start kicking in.