VERSO BOOKS

(P/B) PALESTINE SPEAKS
What is life really like in Gaza and the West Bank? For more than six decades, the Israel-Palestine conflict has been one of the world's most widely reported, yet least understood, human rights crises. Too often the everyday lives and voices of the people in Gaza and the West Bank are forgotten. In Palestine Speaks men and women living under the occupation describe in their own words how it has shaped their lives. This includes eyewitness accounts of the most recent attacks on Gaza in 2014. Part of the highly acclaimed Voices of Witness or...
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(P/B) MINIMA MORALIA
A classic of twentieth-century thought, Minima Moralia is Adorno's literary and philosophical masterpiece Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-century America and finds a life deformed by capitalism. This is Adorno's theoretical and literary masterpiece and a classic of twentieth-century thought. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) PANEGYRIC
Guy Debord's silver-tongue-in-cheek autobiography mixes precision and pastiche in a whirlwind account of philosophy, exploit, and inebriation. From the stark professions of Volume I to the illustrated sequences of Volume 2, Panegyric confronts us with a figure who strategically, demonically tried to wrest life from the disabling modern 'spectacle.' (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARX
In The Philosophy of Marx, Etienne Balibar provides an unsurpassed introduction to Marx and his followers. Written by one of political theory's leading thinkers, it examines all the key areas of Marx's writings in their wider historical and theoretical context - including the concepts of class struggle, ideology, humanism, progress, determinism, commodity fetishism, and the state. The Philosophy of Marx is a gateway into the thought of one of history's great minds. In this new updated edition to this now classic work, Balibar has added a s...
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(P/B) VALENCES OF THE DIALECTIC
After half a century exploring dialectical thought, renowned cultural critic Fredric Jameson presents a comprehensive study of a misunderstood yet vital strain in Western philosophy. The dialectic, the concept of the evolution of an idea through conflicts arising from its inherent contradictions, transformed two centuries of Western philosophy. To Hegel, who dominated nineteenth-century thought, it was a metaphysical system. In the works of Marx, the dialectic became a tool for materialist historical analysis. Jameson brings a theoretical ...
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(P/B) WORKERS AND CAPITAL
The classic text of Italian workerism finally available in English. Workers and Capital is universally recognised as the most important work produced by operaismo, a current of political thought emerging in the 1960s that revolutionised the institutional and extra-parliamentary Left in Italy and beyond. In the decade after its first publication in 1966, the debates over Workers and Capital produced new methods of analysis and a new vocabulary for thousands of militants, helping to inform the new forms of workplace, youth, and community str...
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(P/B) ON THE REPRODUCTION OF CAPITALISM
Louis Althusser's renowned short text 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' radically transformed the concept of the subject, the understanding of the state and even the very frameworks of cultural, political and literary theory. The text has influenced thinkers such as Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. The piece is, in fact, an extract from a much longer book, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, until now unavailable in English. Its publication makes possible a reappraisal of seminal Althusserian texts already availabl...
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(P/B) DID SOMEBODY SAY TOTALITARIANISM?
Totalitarianism has always had a precise strategic function: to guarantee the liberal democratic hegemony by dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the two-faced twin of Right-wing dictatorships. Instead of providing yet another systematic exposition of the history of this notion, Zizek looks at totalitarianism in a way that Wittgenstein would approve of - finding it a cobweb of family resemblances. He reveals the consensus view of totalitarianism, in which it is invariably defined in terms of four things: the holocaust as...
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(P/B) FIRST AS TRAGEDY THEN AS FARCE
Billions of dollars were hastily poured into the global banking system in a frantic attempt at financial stabilisation. So why has it not been possible to bring the same forces to bear in addressing world poverty and environmental crisis? In this take-no-prisoners analysis, Slavoj Zizek frames the moral failures of the modern world in terms of the epoch-making events of the first decade of this century. What he finds is the old one-two punch of history: the jab of tragedy, the right hook of farce. In the attacks of 9/11 and the global cred...
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(P/B) SEXUALITY IN THE FIELD OF VISION
A brilliantly original exploration of the interface between feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics and film theory In Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Jacqueline Rose argues for the importance of sexual difference and fantasy as key concepts through which an interrogation of contemporary theory should be sustained. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) METAPOLITICS
Badiou indicts this approach, which reduces politics to a matter of opinion, thus eliminating any of its truly radical and emancipatory possibilities. Against this intellectual tradition, Badiou proposes instead the consideration of politics in terms of the production of truth and the affirmation of equality. He demands that the question of a possible "political truth" be separated from any notion of consensus or public opinion, and that political action be rethought in terms of the complex process that binds discussion to decision. Starti...
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(P/B) THE BENJAMIN FILES
Jameson's first full-length engagement with Walter Benjamin's work. The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which ...
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(P/B) THE INDIVISIBLE REMAINDER
[...] This book was written in the hope that it will contribute to our perception of Schelling's Weltalter drafts as one of the seminal works of materialism. This claim cannot but provoke an immediate response: Schelling a materialist? Isn't he, rather, the last great representative of anthropomorphic, pre-scientific theosophy? In his Introduction to the first French translation of Schelling's 'Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom', Henri Lefebvre wrote that this treatise 'is certainly not true, but is none the le...
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(P/B) AGOΝΙSTICS
Political conflict in our society is inevitable, and the results are often far from negative. How then should we deal with the intractable differences arising from complex modern culture? Developing her groundbreaking political philosophy of agnostics - the search for a radical and plural democracy - Chantal Mouffe examines international relations, strategies for radical politics, the future of Europe and the politics of artistic practices. She shows that in many circumstances where no alternatives seem possible, agonistics offers a new ro...
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(P/B) THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
In the two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, global capitalism became entrenched in its modern, neoliberal form. Its triumph was so complete that the word "capitalism" itself fell out of use in the absence of credible political alternatives. But with the outbreak of financial crisis and global recession in the twenty-first century, capitalism is once again up for discussion. The status quo can no longer be taken for granted. As Eric Hobsbawm argues in his acute and elegant introduction to this modern edition, in such times The...
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(P/B) METAPHILOSOPHY
In Metaphilosophy, Henri Lefebvre works through the implications of Marx's revolutionary thought to consider philosophy's engagement with the world. Lefebvre takes Marx's notion of the "world becoming philosophical and philosophy becoming worldly" as a leitmotif, examining the relation between Hegelian-Marxist supersession and Nietzschean overcoming. Metaphilosophy is conceived of as a transformation of philosophy, developing it into a programme of radical worldwide change. The book demonstrates Lefebvre's threefold debt to Hegel, Marx and...
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(P/B) PSYCHOPOLITICS
Exploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche. Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault's biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phen...
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(P/B) THE DEMOCRATIC PARADOX
From the theory of 'deliberative democracy' to the politics of the 'third way', the present Zeitgeist is characterized by attempts to deny what Chantal Mouffe contends is the inherently conflictual nature of democratic politics. Far from being signs of progress, such ideas constitute a serious threat to democratic institutions. Taking issue with John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas on one side, and the political tenets of Blair, Clinton and Schroder on the other, Mouffe brings to the fore the paradoxical nature of modern liberal democracy in whi...
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(P/B) DEJA VU AND THE END OF HISTORY
Deja vu, which doubles and confuses our experience of time, is a psychological phenomenon with peculiar relevance to our contemporary historical circumstances. From this starting point, the acclaimed Italian philosopher Paolo Virno examines the construct of memory, the passage of time, and the "end of history." Through thinkers such as Bergson, Kojeve and Nietzsche, Virno shows how our perception of history can become suspended or paralysed, making the distinction between "before" and "after," cause and effect, seem derisory. In examining ...
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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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