VERSO BOOKS

(P/B) THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS
The early Marx called for the "realization of philosophy" through revolution. Revolution thus became a critical concept for Marxism, a view elaborated in the later praxis perspectives of Lukacs and the Frankfurt School. These thinkers argue that fundamental philosophical problems are, in reality, social problems abstractly conceived. Originally published as Lukacs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, The Philosophy of Praxis traces the evolution of this argument in the writings of Marx, Lukacs, Adorno and Marcuse. This reinterpretatio...
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THE SUBLIME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY
Slavoj Zizek, the maverick philosopher, author of over 30 books, acclaimed as the "Elvis of cultural theory", and today's most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes - all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as a serious and sophisticated philosophy. His recent films The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema and Zizek! reveal a theorist at the peak of his p...
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(P/B) Non-Places : An Introduction to Supermodernity
An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls 'non-space' results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of 'supermodernity' to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena - a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and...
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(P/B) POSTMODERNISM
It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. In that case, it either "expresses" some deeper irrepressible historical impulse (in however distorted a fashion) or effectively "represses" and diverts it, depending on the side of the ambiguity you happen to favor. Postmodernism, postmodern consciousness, may then amount to not much more than theorizing its own condition of possibility, which consists primarily in t...
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(P/B) THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP
Influential exploration of the idea of friendship and its political consequences. "O, my friends, there is no friend." The most influential of contemporary philosophers explores the idea of friendship and its political consequences, past and future. Until relatively recently, Jacques Derrida was seen by many as nothing more than the high priest of Deconstruction, by turns stimulating and fascinating, yet always somewhat disengaged from the central political questions of our time. Or so it seemed. Derrida's "political turn," marked especia...
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(P/B) THE PERFECT CRIME
In his new book, perhaps the most cogent expression of his mature thought, Jean Baudrillard turns detective in order to investigate a crime which he hopes may yet be solved: the "murder" of reality. To solve the crime would be to unravel the social and technological processes by which reality has quite simply vanished under the deadly glare of media "real time". But Baudrillard is not merely intending to lament the disappearance of the real, an occurrence he recently described as "the most important event of modern history", nor even to me...
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(H/B) Disordered Attention
The ways we encounter contemporary art and performance is changing. Installations brim with archival documents. Dances stretch for weeks. Performances last a minute. Exhibitions are spread out over thirty venues. There are endless artworks about mid-century architecture and design. How are we expected to engage with today's diverse practise? Is the old model of close-looking still the ideal, or has it given way to browsing, skimming, and sampling? Across four essays, art historian and critic Claire Bishop identifies trends in contemporary ...
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(P/B) Terminal Boredom
The first English language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon. On a planet where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia terupted. Two old friends enjoy cocktails on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems. A bickering couple emigrate to a world that has worked out an innovative way to side-step the need for war, only to bring their quarrels (and something far more destructive) with them. And in the tit...
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(P/B) THE MENTAL AND THE MATERIAL
What is the specificity of the human race within nature? How is its history to be explained? What impact do material realities, natural and man-made, have on human beings? What role does thought, in all its dimensions, play in the production of social relations? How are the human sciences to be advanced today? These are among the crucial questions confronted by Godelier in this key book of contemporary social theory. Its point of departure lies in a fact and a hypothesis. The fact: in contrast to other social animals, human beings do not j...
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(P/B) PUBLIC SPHERE AND EXPERIENCE
The "public sphere" is a key concept in political discourse, designating a space for political action. But is this a single authoritative and universal space in which various positions compete for recognition, or does it consist of multiple local spaces spread over diverse collectivities? In Kluge and Negt's groundbreaking book they examine the material conditions of experience in an arena that had previously figured only as an abstract term: the media of mass and consumer culture. With a new, up-to-date introduction from Alexander Kluge. ...
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(P/B) FRAMES OF WAR
In this urgent response to violence, racism and increasingly aggressive methods of coercion, Judith Butler explores the media's portrayal of armed conflict, a process integral to how the West prosecutes its wars. In doing so, she calls for a reconceptualization of the left, one united in opposition and resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of interventionist military action. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) READ MY DESIRE
In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern discourses - psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these discourses only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede historicity to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical process, its generative principl...
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(P/B) History and Class Consciousness
History and Class Consciousness was the most important of Georg Lukacs's early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923. The subject of high praise and passionate criticism, it had a major impact on all the Marxist debates that followed, introducing key new concepts such as 'totality', 'reification' and 'imputed class consciousness'. This centenary edition, with a new preface by Michael Lowy, comprises a series of essays exploring, among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of legality and illegality, Ro...
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(P/B) THE NON-JEWISH JEW
In these essays Deutscher speaks of the emotional heritage of the European Jew with a calm clear-sightedness. As a historian he writes without religious belief, but with a generous breadth of understanding; as a philosopher he writes of some of the great Jews of Europe: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Freud. He explores the Jewish imagination through the painter Chagall. He writes of the Jews under Stalin and of the "remnants of a race" after Hitler, as well as of the Zionist ideal, of the establishment of the state of Israel...
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(P/B) CITY OF QUARTZ
No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, L.A. is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In Ci...
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(P/B) IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
The definitive, bestselling book on the origins and development of nationalism. Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson's brilliant book on nationalism, forged a new field of study when it first appeared in 1983. Since then it has sold over a quarter of a million copies and is widely considered the most important book on the subject. In this greatly anticipated revised edition, Anderson updates and elaborates on the core question: what makes people live, die and kill in the name of nations? He shows how an originary nationalism born in the...
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(P/B) The Flowers of Evil
A DUAL-LANGUAGE EDITION OF THE WORK THAT SCANDALIZED PARIS AND REINVENTED BEAUTY. Probing the depths of the modern psyche in a voice at once caustic and vulnerable, melancholic and humorous, Baudelaire's infamous book brings to the surface a new understanding of evil, of eroticism, and of social life through an astonishing variety of poetic forms and styles. This edition adds the poems banned from the original 1857 publication to the expanded collection of 1861 and includes an introduction from the translator, acclaimed poetry scholar Nath...
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(P/B) Late Fascism
In a world shaken by ecological, economic and political crises, the forces of authoritarianism and reaction seem to have the upper hand. How should we name, map and respond to this state of affairs? Late Fascism turns to theories of fascism produced in the past century, testing their capacity to illuminate our moment and challenging many of the commonplaces that debate on this extremely charged term devolves into. It can be tempting for any contemporary assessment of fascism to reach for historical analogy. Fascism is defined by returns an...
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(H/B) Overshoot
The world is on the cusp of one and a half degrees of warming - just the rise it has committed itself to avoiding. Heat at such levels would be intolerable. Even before one and a half, seasons of climate disaster have struck with ever more devastating force, and yet a notion has taken hold that the cause is now lost: the intolerable has become unavoidable. The limit will be overshot - perhaps two degrees as well - and the best we can do is cool down the Earth at some later point, towards the end of the century, by means of technologies not...
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(P/B) ABOLISH THE FAMILY
What if we could do better than the family? We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family. Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case...
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