The Platypus Affiliated Society

Disappearances: Reflections on the collapse of honey bees and the Left

The ominously titled 2007 PBS documentary Silence of the Bees begins with a montage of the streets of a major U.S. city that had grown silent because its inhabitants vanished. The empty city, we are told, is not unlike the beehives afflicted by Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a commercial honey bee syndrome that has resulted in massive apian losses. A few minutes into the documentary, however, we are informed that the metaphor should be considered more literally, as “the bees’ disappearance could have colossal repercussions for humans.”

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NYC Forum: 30 Years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran: The Tragedy of the Left

The Platypus Affiliated Society presents
30 Years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran: The Tragedy of the Left
6:00pm Sunday, September 13, 2009
at The Brecht Forum 451 West St New York, NY

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notes to Rousseau

I'd like to write some notes to you now about beginning this reading group mini-course with Rousseau.

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Platypus at Left Forum 2009

Left Forum 2009 "Turning Points"
April 17-19, 2009
Dialectics of Defeat: Towards a Theory of Historical Regression and
Politics of the Contemporary Student Left: Hopes and Failures

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Heidegger's conservative-reactionary misunderstanding of freedom

". . . [M]odern man finds his own 'essence' in his greatest discovery, namely, that the most important thing is to turn 'life' into a 'lived experience' and to make all possibilities of lived-experience accessible generally to all in an equal manner so that through this universality of 'lived experience' 'life' may prove and actualize itself as the unconditioned whole. . . . Without initiating its own self-destruction, how could that which has made itself beforehand the goal of itself and has put all goal-setting at the service of this goal, ever inquire into a goal?

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