Amadeo Bordiga was one of the greatest figures of the Third, or Communist, International. His formidable body of writings remains energizing, instructive, and often surprisingly topical today. The Science and Passion of Communism presents the battles of this brilliant Italian communist in the revolutionary cycle of the post-WWI period, through his writings against reformism and war, for Soviet power and internationalism, and against fascism, on one side, and Stalinism and the degeneration of the International, on the other. Equally important was his sharp critique of triumphant U.S. capitalism in the post-WWII period, and his original re-presentation of the Marxist critique of political economy, which includes the capital-nature and capital-species relationships, as well as a programme of social transformations for the revolution to come.

A people's history and the horror of war: Howard Zinn meets Apocalypse Now. Political autobiography. March 1972, about to graduate from NYU. A journey: two days and nights in the New York subway. Love it or leave it. A decision: become a Great Academic Marxist; blow up the Williamsburg Bridge; go into exile. Vietnam Veterans with placards, for and against the war. Seven placard-men at the seven gates of Thebes, brandishing their shields. A decision. Political or personal? Or pure Zen? Mind or no-mind? Kill for peace! Dylan, Hendrix, or the Fugs. The two Suzukis, or Dogen. Monk and Coltrane! The relation between Hegel's logic of thinking as such and his logic of practice, which does not exist. The screech of the subway stops. A fork where three roads cross, the realm of shadows, what is to be done? A Chinese menu? Stab it! Stab it with your fork! But what I, myself, decide is not the point. The point is the question of 'what a decision is and what making a decision means.' The answer is 'never stop asking.' Ask yourself. Ask FDR, JFK, LBJ, McNamara and his band, John Kerry, or a Vietnam War veteran of your choice. Ask Nixon, Kissinger-Trump! Ask Trump! Ye great decision-makers, have you ever asked yourselves what a decision is and what making a decision means! That is the question. The Empty Shield asks it. Repeatedly, repetitiously, abysally, and, possibly, once and for all.

Meta-memoir, 'after' memoir. Aristotle's Meta-physics comes 'after' his Physics. 'An Abyss of Dreams' is a 'meta' book, an 'after' book. A dream itself has no 'before' but only a 'present,' which in consciousness is already an 'after.' This is the author's 'dream book': he recounts, vividly, his real nighttime dreams, of the night before, and of years and decades before. His two cats tell their tales, chasing their tails, 'after' their lives and their deaths. His protagonists: Pound, Artaud, Conrad; Hegel, his logic, philosophy of spirit, and 'anthropology'; Aristotle; and Freud. And Plato, (affectionately) accused of being the father of contemporary totalitarianism. This Abyss originates in Hegel's lines on the 'night of the world,' the 'terrible,' the nocturnal abyss of conscious life, pure self, 'the interior of nature,' where 'suddenly a bloody head darts out and just as suddenly vanishes.' Meanwhile, for Freud, 'old eel,' dreams are wish fulfillment. What! asks the author, in 'Why Dream?', the first of the two novellas in this volume. Wish fulfillment? Then why do I only have nightmares? I only dream what I do not wish for! Why, Siggy, why? Why dream? Aristotle is next, with his schoolmate at Plato's Academy, Eudemus, known to us only for his (relatively) famous dream, and for Aristotle's lost dialogue dedicated to him, 'On the Soul.' Eudemus, our real hero. Who, unlike Aristotle, was to be famous only for his dream, celebrated, and fatally distorted, by Platonists, forever. But, we dream, not by Aristotle, forever tormented by the dream itself and, especially, by its totalitarian distortion. This is the premise of the second novella, 'I Dream of Eudemus': Eudemus, 'psyche iatros,' dreamed as the first 'soul doctor' in history. The first, and already a rebel: no drugs, no! 'Abyss therapy.' Dreams have long afterlives: 'An Abyss of Dreams' is 'meta'-memoir. With its cats, and its dreams, we travel through the entire history of psychiatry, from ancient Greece to present-day Venice. Where, dressed in a moon suit, Eudemus visits the author's great friend, and psychiatrist, in Intensive Care, in the Venice hospital. Chasing their tails, author and Eudemus together see, for themselves, reaching out from the eyes of their friend, the beginning, and the end, of the soul: the night of the world.