THE REVOLT ECLIPSES WHATEVER THE WORLD HAS TO OFFER

By Idris Robinson



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.


“The real challenge for the Left today isn’t diagnosing what’s wrong or coming up with alternatives, but figuring out how to fan the flames of insurrection and dismantle the crumbling empire of capital. It’s here, on the crucial terrain of strategy, that The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer intervenes. With razor-sharp philosophical insight and an unflinching drive to ask the hardest questions, Idris Robinson is exactly the kind of revolutionary thinker we need to identify and escalate the subversive potentials both in and beyond the American wasteland.”
—Søren Mau

“Idris Robinson. Idris? I hope you’re named after the jazz drummer Idris Muhammad cuz the way you can intellectually riff is like WOOO! Your ability to make your rebel brain lay out resistance and resilience, using simultaneous interrogative chords, while including the voice of your absent and locked up co-conspirators, Oooooo! The professor radical, fully engaged. Cigarette dangling from your mouth. Ooooo! I know that when you write you’re about to arm us with timely insights. Crazy radical of my common ancestry, i love you. Write on? Right On!”
—Ashanti Alston

“We once had this great expression, warrior-poet, and we ruined it. We ruined it through overuse, ruined it because we could not believe in it, ruined it because the division of labor insisted there could be no such thing. We ruined it because its grandeur rang false against the modern world’s pettiness. But you can’t ruin history. As things get more and more fucked up, more volatile, more desperate, it’s certain that more warrior-poets will emerge, and I think they will be measured against Idris Robinson.”
—Joshua Clover

Paperback, 152 pp.
Forthcoming Sept. 9, 2025