VERSO BOOKS

(P/B) LACAN
Jacques Lacan continues to be subject to the most extravagant interpretations. Angelic to some, he is demonic to others. To recall Lacan's career, now that the heroic age of psychoanalysis is over, is to remember an intellectual and literary adventure that occupies a founding place in our modernity. Lacan went against the current of many of the hopes aroused by 1968, but embraced their paradoxes, and his language games and wordplay resonate today as so many injunctions to replace rampant individualism with a heightened social consciousness...
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(P/B) THE INFORMATION BOMB
Virilio's exploration of the relationship between technology, war and information technology. ?Civilization or the militarization of science?? With this typically hyperbolic and provocative question as a starting point, Paul Virilio explores the dominion of techno-science, cyberwar and the new information technologies over our lives . . . and deaths. After the era of the atomic bomb, Virilio posits an era of genetic and information bombs which replace the apocalyptic bang of nuclear death with the whimper of a subliminally reinforced eugen...
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(P/B) The Origin of Capitalism
How did the dynamic economic system we know as capitalism develop among the peasants and lords of feudal Europe? In The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, imperialism, and the modern nation state. Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce. Rather, it is a late and localized product of very spec...
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(H/B) After Work
Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you're confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete - cooking, cleaning, looking after the kids, and so on. In this ground-breaking book, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek lay out how unpaid work in our homes has come to take up an ever-increasing portion of our lives - how the vacuum of free time has been taken up by vacuuming. Examining the history of the home over the past century - from running water to white goods...
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(P/B) THE COMMUNIST HORIZON
Jodi Dean unshackles the communist ideal from the failures of the Soviet Union. In the new capitalism of networked information technologies, our very ability to communicate is exploited, but revolution is still possible if we organise on the basis of our common and collective desires. Examining the experience of the Occupy movement, Dean argues that such spontaneity can’t develop into a revolution and it needs to constitute itself as a party. An innovative work of pressing relevance, The Communist Horizon offers nothing less than a manifes...
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(H/B) NEVER ENDING NIGHTMARE
How do we explain the strange survival of the forces responsible for the 2008 economic crisis, the worst since 1929? How is it that the economic policies that created the Great Recession emerged stronger than ever? When the system broke, a number of the world's most prominent economists hastened to announce that neoliberalism was over. But reports of its death were greatly exaggerated. For Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, neoliberalism is no mere dogma. Supported by powerful oligarchies, it is a veritable politico-institutional system, o...
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(P/B) AESTHETICS AND POLITICS
An intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked...
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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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(P/B) DARKWATER
The distinguished American civil rights leader, W. E. B. Du Bois first published these fiery essays, sketches, and poems individually nearly 80 years ago in the Atlantic, the Journal of Race Development, and other periodicals. Part essay, part autobiography, Darkwater explicitly addresses significant issues, such as the oppression of women and Eurocentric standards of beauty, the historical rise of the idea of whiteness, and the abridgement of democracy along race, class, and gender lines. Reflecting the author's ideas as a politician, his...
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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) THE METASTASES OF ENJOYMENT
The experience of the Yugoslav war and the rise of "irrational" violence in contemporary societies provides the theoretical and political context of this book, which uses Lacanian psychoanalysis as the basis for a renewal of the Marxist theory of ideology. The author's analysis leads into a study of the figure of woman in modern art and ideology, including studies of The Crying Game and the films of David Lynch, and the links between violence and power/gender relations. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) AMERICA
"A sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left."-New York Times In America, France's leading philosopher of postmodernism took to the freeways to produce a collection of traveler's tales from the land of hyperreality. From the sierras of New Mexico to the streets of New York and LA by night-"a sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity"-Baudrillard mixes aper?us and observations with a wicked sense of fun to provide a unique insight into the country that dominates the world. In this new edition, leading cultural critic and...
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(P/B) NARCOLAND
The product of five years' investigative reporting, the subject of intense national controversy, and the source of death threats that forced the National Human Rights Commission to assign two full-time bodyguards to its author, Anabel Hernandez, Narcoland has been a publishing and political sensation in Mexico. The definitive history of the drug cartels, Narcoland takes readers to the front lines of the "war on drugs," which has so far cost more than 60,000 lives in just six years. Hernandez explains in riveting detail how Mexico became a ...
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(H/B) THE EMANCIPATED SPECTATOR
The foremost philosopher of art argues for a new politics of looking. The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance. In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Ranciere takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goe...
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(P/B) THE FORCE OF NONVIOLENCE
Judith Butler's new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of...
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(P/B) FEMINISM FOR THE 99%
Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, inadequate healthcare, border policing, climate change - these are not what you ordinarily hear feminists talking about. But aren't they the biggest issues for the vast majority of women around the globe? Taking as its inspiration the new wave of feminist militancy that has erupted globally, this manifesto makes a simple but powerful case: feminism shouldn't start - or stop - with the drive to have women represented at the top of their professions. It must focus on those at the bottom, and fight for the...
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(H/B) THE LAST MAN TAKES LSD
Foucault's personal and political experimentation, its ambiguous legacy, and the rise of neoliberal politics Part intellectual history, part critical theory, The Last Man Takes LSD challenges the way we think about both Michel Foucault and modern progressive politics. One fateful day in May 1975, Foucault dropped acid in the southern California desert. In letters reproduced here, he described it as among the most important events of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. That trip helped redirect ...
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(P/B) THE STORYTELLER
A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker's short stories. The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, an...
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(P/B) A COMPANION TO MARX'S CAPITAL (VOLUME I)
The radical geographer guides us through the classic text of political economy. "My aim is to get you to read a book by Karl Marx called Capital, Volume 1, and to read it on Marx’s own terms..." The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression has generated a surge of interest in Marx’s work in the effort to understand the origins of our current predicament. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world’s most foremost Marx scholars. Based on his recent lectures, this current vo...
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(P/B) GIRLS AGAINST GOD
"It's 1992 and I'm the Gloomiest Child Queen." Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her past, her practice and her hatred, things start stirring themselves up around her. In a corner of Oslo, a coven of witches begins cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a black metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group o...
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