Search results for ""Verso Books""
Verso Books The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London
In a unique journey from the oil fields of the Caspian Sea to the refineries and financial centres of Northern Europe, James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello track the concealed routes along which flows the lifeblood of our economy. The stupendous resource of Azerbaijani crude has long inspired dreams of a world remade. From the revolutionary Futurism of the capital city, Baku, in the 1920s to the unblinking Capitalism of modern London, the drive to control the region's oil reserves-and hence people and events-has shattered environments and shaped societies.In The Oil Road, the human scale of village life in the Caucasus Mountains and the plains of Anatolia is suddenly, and sometimes fatally, confronted by the almost ungraspable scale of the oil corporation BP. Pipelines and tanker routes tie the fraying social democracies of Italy, Austria and Germany to the repressive regimes of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. A web of financial and political institutions in London stitches together the lives of metropolis and village.Building on a decade of study with Platform, Marriott and Minio-Paluello guide us through a previously obscured landscape of energy production and consumption, resistance and profit that has marked Europe for over a century. They blend the empathy of committed travel writing with the precision of investigative journalism in a timely book of compelling urgency.The human race travels the Oil Road, and this book helps us to realize where we are heading and why it is time to change direction.
£13.60
Verso Books Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation
In a wide-ranging survey of the minefields of contemporary philosophy and social thought, Roy Bhaskar develops his own positive and highly original theories of the nature of science and being, social science and history, and philosophical discourse and ideology.Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation starts from an assessment of the impasse of contemporary philosophy of science which stems from an incomplete critique of positivism. It then proceeds to a systematic exposition of scientific realism in the form of transcendental realism. This highlights a conception of science as explanatory of a structured, differentiated and changing world.Turning to the social domain, the book argues for a view of the social order as conditioned by, and emergent from, nature. Advocating a critical naturalism, the author shows how the transformational model of social activity together with the conception of social science as explanatory critique which it entails, resolve the divisions besetting orthodox social and normative theory: between society and the individual, structure and agency, fact and value, and theory and practice.From reviews of the author's previous work:'(Roy Bhaskar's work) stands comparison with the work of the contemporary giants of Marxist philosophy on the continent . . . A unique achievement, and it will no doubt be at the centre of discussion, both English and Continental, for some time to come'. Roy Edgley, The Literary Review'A genuinely original argument in the philosophy of science is a rare thing indeed. Mr Bhaskar has indeed produced a new . . . strong, elaborate and well-integrated . . . elegant and powerful argument'. Rom Harre, Mind
£21.79
Verso Books Raiding the Icebox
Provides a kaleidoscopic review of the avant-garde and radical subcultures of the twentieth century, and explains how artistic statements of the era redrew the line between high and low art.
£77.43
Verso Books Future of Denial
The age of denial is over, we are told. Yet emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green- washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. This timely, interdisciplinary contribution to the environmental humanities draws on the latest climatology, the first shoots of an energy transition, critical theory, Earth’s paleoclimate history, and trends in border violence to answer the most pressing question of our age: Why do we continue to squander the short time we have left?The symptoms suggest society’s inability to adjust is profound. Near Portland, militias incapable of accepting that the world is warming respond to a wildfire by hunting for imaginary left-wing arsonists. Europe erects nets in the Aegean Sea to capture migrants fleeing drought and war. An airline claims to be carbon neutral thanks to bogus cheap offsets. Drone strikes hit people living along the aridity line. Yes, Exxon knew as early as the 1970s, but t
£20.00
Verso Books Forbidden Fruit: An Anthropologist Looks at Incest
What is incest? Is it universally prohibited? Does this prohibition concern only "biological" kinships or does it extend to various "social" kinships, such as those that are formed today in so-called blended families but which also exist in many other societies?This prohibition plays a fundamental role in the functioning of the multiple kinship systems studied throughout the world. But where does it come from? Can we think, with Claude Lévi-Strauss, that the prohibition of incest alone marks the passage from nature to culture? And how can we understand, then, the persistent tension between the proclaimed, institutionalized prohibition and the incestuous practice which, everywhere, remains?World-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier highlights an essential fact, the spontaneously asocial and undifferentiated character of human sexuality and the need for a social regulation of this spontaneity. It thus brings to light the main teachings of anthropology on the question of incest, a major social fact of burning relevance today.
£10.64
Verso Books The Price is Wrong
What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable?This is Brett Christophers' claim. The global economy is moving too slowly toward sustainability because the return on green investment is too low.Today's consensus is that the key to curbing climate change is to produce green electricity and electrify everything possible. The main economic barrier in that project has seemingly been removed. But while prices of solar and wind power have tumbled, the golden era of renewables has yet to materialize.The problem is that investment is driven by profit, not price, and operating solar and wind farms remains a marginal business, dependent everywhere on the state's financial support.We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood
£22.00
Verso Books Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It
Shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2023Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy. What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital - and starve it to death.
£14.69
Verso Books How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century
Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solidarity can both provide the basis for a critique of capitalism, and help to guide us towards a socialist and democratic society. In this elegant book, Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into a concise and tightly argued manifesto analyzing the varieties of anti-capitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing. How to Be an Anticapitalist is an urgent and powerful argument for socialism, and a unparalleled guide to help us get there. Another world is possible.
£14.41
Verso Books Girls Against God
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 begin cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a death 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 of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. And awful things happen in aspic.Jenny Hval's latest novel is a radical fusion of feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, writing and art.
£14.98
Verso Books The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind
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 checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state's monopoly on violence.Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how 'racial phantasms' inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.
£15.10
Verso Books Collected Works, Volume 1
Among the most influential political and social forces of the twentieth century, modern communism rests firmly on philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings developed by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin. For anyone who seeks to understand the twentieth century, capitalism, the Russian Revolution, and the role of Communism in the tumultuous political and social movements that have shaped the modern world, the works of Lenin offer unparalleled insight and understanding. Taken together, they represent a balanced cross-section of his revolutionary theories of history, politics, and economics; his tactics for securing and retaining power; and his vision of a new social and economic order.This first volume contains four works ("New Economic Developments in Peasant Life," "On the So-Called Market Question," "What the 'Friends of the People' Are and How They Fight the Social- Democrats," "The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of It in Mr. Struve's Book") written by Lenin in 1893-1894, at the outset of his revolutionary activity, during the first years of the struggle to establish a workers' revolutionary party in Russia.
£29.99
Verso Books Homo Juridicus: On the Anthropological Function of the Law
In this groundbreaking work, French legal scholar Alain Supiot examines the relationship of society to legal discourse. He argues that the law is how justice is implemented in secular society, but it is not simply a technique to be manipulated at will: it is also an expression of the core beliefs of the West. We must recognize its universalizing, dogmatic nature and become receptive to other interpretations from non-Western cultures to help us avoid the clash of civilizations. In Homo Juridicus, Supiot deconstructs the illusion of a world that has become 'flat' and undifferentiated, regulated only by supposed 'laws' of science and the economy, and peopled by contract-makers driven by only the calculation of their individual interests.
£15.05
Verso Books The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society
Exploring the genesis of neoliberalism, and the political and economic circumstances of its deployment, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval dispel numerous common misconceptions. Neoliberalism is neither a return to classical liberalism nor the restoration of "pure" capitalism. To misinterpret neoliberalism is to fail to understand what is new about it: far from viewing the market as a natural given that limits state action, neoliberalism seeks to construct the market and use it as a model for governments. Only once this is grasped will its opponents be able to meet the unprecedented political and intellectual challenge it poses.
£11.69
Verso Books Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.
£15.28
Verso Books Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City
What does it feel like to find the city's edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a place for endless adventure.Plotting expeditions from London, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Bradley L. Garrett has tested the boundaries of urban security in order to experience the city in ways beyond the everyday. He calls it "place hacking": the recoding of closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban spaces to make them realms of opportunity. The book is also a manifesto, combining philosophy, politics and adventure, on our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-first-century metropolis.
£20.99
Verso Books Napoleon's Cursed War: Spanish Popular Resistance in the Peninsular War, 1808–14
In this definitive account of the Peninsular War (1808-14), Napoleon's six-year war against Spain, Ronald Fraser examines what led to the emperor's devastating defeat against the popular opposition - the guerrillas - and their British and Portuguese allies. As well as relating the histories of the great political and military figures of the war, Fraser brings to life the anonymous masses - the artisans, peasants and women who fought, suffered and died - and restores their role in this barbaric war to its rightful place while overturning the view that this was a straightforward military campaign. This vivid, meticulously researched book offers a distinct and profound vision of "Napoleon's Vietnam" and shows the reality of the disasters of war: the suffering, discontents and social upheaval that accompanied the fighting.With a new Introduction by Perry Anderson.
£25.00
Verso Books Police: A Field Guide
This book armed activists on the streets-as well as the many who have become concerned about police abuse-with a critical analysis and ultimately a redefinition of the very idea of policing. The book contends that when we talk about police and police reform, we speak the language of police legitimation through the art of euphemism. So state sexual assault become "body-cavity search," and ruthless beatings become "non-compliance deterrence."A Field Guide to the Police is a study of the indirect and taken-for granted language of policing, a language we're all forced to speak when we talk about law enforcement. In entries like "Police dog," "Stop and frisk," and "Rough ride," the authors expose the way "copspeak" suppresses the true meaning and history of policing. Like any other field guide, it reveals a world that is hidden in plain view. The book argues that a redefined language of policing might help chart a future free society.Now in an expanded and updated edition, including explanations of newsmaking new terms, like "dead names", "kettling", and "qualified immunity", as well as a new foreword by leading criminal justice advocate Craig Gilmore
£13.60
Verso Books Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
Praised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft "ought to be positioned," as Bookforum put it, "at the center of any discussion of race in American life." Most people assume racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call "racecraft." And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed. That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions.
£14.45
Verso Books The Communist Manifesto / The April Theses
It was the 1917 Russian Revolution that transformed the scale of the Communist Manifesto, making it the key text for socialists everywhere. On the centenary of this upheaval, this volume pairs Marx and Engels's most famous work with Lenin's own revolutionary manifesto, "The April Theses," which lifts politics from the level of everyday banalities to become an art-form.The Communist Manifesto"Oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."The Communist Manifesto is the most influential political text ever written-few other calls to action have stirred and changed the world. Now, in the wake of a punishing financial crisis, in a world built on regimes of permanent austerity, each rife with horrific disparities in wealth, this short book remains a reference point for those trying to understand the transformations being wrought by capitalism and its concomitant forms of exploitation.This centenary edition includes a new introduction by Tariq Ali, contextualizing the period-the eve of the 1848 revolutions-in which Marx and Engels penned their masterpiece and argues that it desperately needs a successor."The April Theses""The chain breaks first at its weakest link."In Lenin's "April Theses," written in 1917, he presented his ten analytical maxims, outlining a programme to accelerate and complete the revolution that had begun in February of that year. Now, on the revolution's centenary, Verso presents them here alongside Lenin's 'Letters from Afar', written in exile that March and addressed to his comrades in Petrograd. In these missives, he offers advice and instruction to comrades pushing ahead with their ideals in the aftermath of the February revolution.The introduction by Tariq Ali traces The Communist Manifesto's influence on Lenin's "April Theses," the text that brought the manifesto to life and made it one of the most widely read books in history. For Lenin, writes Ali, it was the birth of imperialism, the legitimate offspring of capitalism, that signalled the end of the latter's "progressive capacities."
£10.62
Verso Books Revolution: An Intellectual History
This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of "dialectical images": Marx's "locomotives of history," Alexandra Kollontai's sexually liberated bodies, Lenin's mummified body, Auguste Blanqui's barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune's demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others. It connects theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectuals-from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to José Carlos Mariátegui, C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South-as outcasts and pariahs. And finally, it analyzes the entanglement between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new intellectual history of the revolutionary past.
£25.00
Verso Books Modern Times: Temporality in Art and Politics
In this book Jacques Rancière radicalises his critique of modernism and its postmodern appendix. He contrasts their unilinear and exclusive time with the interweaving of temporalities at play in modern processes of emancipation and artistic revolutions, showing how this plurality itself refers to the double dimension of time. Time is more than a line drawn from the past to the future. It is a form of life, marked by the ancient hierarchy between those who have time and those who do not. This hierarchy, continued in the Marxist notion of the vanguard and nakedly exhibited in Clement Greenberg's modernism, still governs a present which clings to the fable of historical necessity and its experts. In opposition to this, Rancière shows how the break with the hierarchical conception of time, formulated by Emerson in his vision of the new poet, implies a completely different idea of the modern. He sees the fulfilment of this in the two arts of movement, cinema and dance, which at the beginning of the twentieth century abolished the opposition between free and mechanical people, at the price of exposing the rift between the revolution of artists and that of strategists.
£14.18
Verso Books The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene
To understand the scale of what faces us and how it ramifies through every corner of our lives is to marvel at our inaction. Why aren't we holding emergency meetings in every city, town and village every week?What is to be done to create a planet where a communist horizon offers a new dawn to replace our planetary twilight? What does it mean to be a communist after we have hit a climate tipping point?The Tragedy of the Worker is a brilliant, stringently argued pamphlet reflecting on capitalism's death drive, the left's complicated entanglements with fossil fuels, and the rising tide of fascism. In response, the authors propose Salvage Communism, a programme of restoration and reparation that must precede any luxury communism. They set out a new way to think about the Anthropocene. The Tragedy of the Worker demands an alternative future - the Proletarocene - one capable of repairing the ravages of capitalism and restoring the world.
£11.45
Verso Books The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Viral Age
The Unconscious knows no time, it has no before-and-after, it does not have a history of its own. Yet, it does not always remain the same. Different political and economic conditions transform the way in which the Unconscious emerges within the "psychosphere" of society. In the early 20th century, Freud characterized the Unconscious as the dark side of the well-order framework of Progress and Reason. At the end of the past century, Deleuze and Guattari described it as a laboratory: the magmatic force ceaselessly bringing to the fore new possibilities of imagination. Today, at a time of viral pandemics and in the midst of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism, the Unconscious has begun to emerge in yet another form. In this book, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi vividly portraits the form in which the Unconscious will make itself manifest for decades to come, and the challenges that it will pose to our possibilities of political action, poetic imagination, and therapy.
£15.17
Verso Books The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism
In this authoritative, accessible study, historian Suzanne Schneider examines the politics and ideology of the Islamic State (better known as ISIS). Schneider argues that today's jihad is not the residue from a less enlightened time, nor does it have much in common with its classical or medieval form, but it does bear a striking resemblance to the reactionary political formations and acts of spectacular violence that are upending life in Western democracies. From authoritarian populism to mass shootings, xenophobic nationalism, and the allure of conspiratorial thinking, Schneider argues that modern jihad is not the antithesis of neoliberalism, but rather a dark reflection of its inner logic.The Apocalypse and the End of History is written with the sensibility of a political theorist and based on extensive research into a wide range of sources, from Islamic jurisprudence to popular recruitment videos, contemporary apocalyptic literature and the Islamic State's Arabic-language publications. The book explores modern jihad as an image of a potential dark future already heralded by neoliberal modes of life. Surveying ideas of the state, violence, identity, and political community, Schneider argues that modern jihad and neoliberalism are two versions of a politics of failure: the inability to imagine a better life here on earth.
£16.99
Verso Books The Prisoner: A Memoir
In 1993, writer and democracy activist Hwang Sok-yong was sentenced to five years in the Seoul Detention Center upon his return to South Korea from North Korea, the country he had fled with his family as a child at the start of the Korean War. Already a dissident writer well-known for his part in the democracy movement of the 1980s, Hwang's imprisonment forced him to consider the many prisons to which he was subject-of thought, of writing, of Cold War nations, of the heart. In this capacious memoir, Hwang's life is set against the volatile political backdrop of modern Korea, a country subject to colonialism, Cold War division, a devastating war, decades of authoritarian dictatorships, a mass democratic uprising, and a still-lingering, painful division between North and South. The Prisoner moves between Hwang's imprisonment and scenes from his life-as a boy in Pyongyang and Seoul, as a young activist protesting South Korea's military dictatorships, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, as a dissident writer first traveling abroad-and in so doing, braids his extraordinary life into the dramatic revolutions and transformations of Korean society during the twentieth century.
£30.00
Verso Books Verso Notebook
Following on the success of the Verso diary, Verso are now launching a new, beautifully designed notebook. Inspired by the original covers of New Left Book, the notebook is fully lined in the signature Verso red and in a handy portable size. Adding some radical to your writing.
£11.24
Verso Books Contraventions: Editorials from New Left Review
From 9/11 to the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, the eurozone crisis to the Brexit vote, the Great Recession to the Arab Spring, the rise of China to the annexation of Crimea, the passage from Obama to Trump and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the London-based New Left Review has offered a series of sharply critical editorials, combining argument with analysis-radical antidotes to the self-serving accounts of the Anglophone press. Contraventions brings together a selection of NLR's key political writings, covering capitalist boom and bust, the changing forms of American hegemony, the combined and uneven development of world powers, the domestic politics of the US and UK and multiple revolts from below, at the ballot box or in the streets. Bookended by broader surveys of the political-intellectual conjuncture, these essays dismantle mainstream narratives and anatomize the ideologies, institutions and on-the-ground operations of liberal-imperial rule.Contraventions includes texts by Perry Anderson, Tariq Ali, Mike Davis, Susan Watkins, Alexander Cockburn, Peter Gowan, Tony Wood, JoAnn Wypijewski, Tom Hazeldine and Dylan Riley.
£25.00
Verso Books Behind Enemy Lies: War, News and Chaos in the Middle East
In this urgent and timely book, Patrick Cockburn writes the first draft of the history of the current crisis in the Middle East.Here he charts the period from the recapture of Mosul in 2017 to Turkey's attack on Kurdish territory in November 2019, and recounts the new phase in the wars of disintegration that have plagued the region, leading to the assassination of Iranian General Sulemani.Cockburn offers panoramic on-the-ground analysis as well as a lifetime's study of the region. As author of The Rise of Islamic State, and the Age of Jihad, he has proved to be leading, critical commentator of US intervention and the chaos it has wrecked/ And here he shows how, since Trump entered the White House promising an end to the Forever War, peace appears a distant possibility with the continuation of conflict in Syria, Saudi Arabia's violent intervention in the Yemen, the fall of the Kurds, riots in Baghdad, and the continued aggression towards Iran. While ISIS has been defeated, it is not clear whether it has disappeared from the region. Trump's policies has appeared to pour petrol on the flames, emboldening the other superpowers involved in the proxy wars. Following the collapse of the deal with Iran, and the threat of war crimes, is a new balance of power possible?
£18.99
Verso Books Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent
Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women's desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women-and their bodies-want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to?In this elegant, searching book-spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism-Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women's desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood?In today's crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions about perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault's teasing promise, in 1976, that 'tomorrow sex will be good again'
£13.98
Verso Books The Verso Book of Feminism: Revolutionary Words from Four Millennia of Rebellion
Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on women's bodies and women's lives. People-of any and no gender-have protested and theorized, penned manifestos and written poetry and songs, testified and lobbied, gone on strike and fomented revolution, quietly demanded that there is an "I" and loudly proclaimed that there is a "we." The Book of Feminism chronicles this history of defiance and tracks it around the world as it develops into a multivocal and unabashed force.Global in scope, The Book of Feminism shows the breadth of feminist protest and of feminist thinking, moving through the female poets of China's Tang Dynasty to accounts of indigenous women in the Caribbean resisting Columbus's expedition, British suffragists militating for the vote to the revolutionary petroleuses of the 1848 Paris Commune, the first century Trung sisters who fought for the independence of Nam Viet to women in 1980s Botswana fighting for equal protection under the law, from the erotica of the 6th century and the 19th century to radical queer politics in the 20th and 21st.The Book of Feminism is a weapon, a force, a lyrical cry, and an ongoing threat to misogyny everywhere.
£12.02
Verso Books Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.
£13.02
Verso Books Culture and Materialism
A comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century.Raymond Williams is a towering presence in cultural studies, most importantly as the founder of the apporach that has come to be known as "cultural materialism." Yet Williams's method was always open-ended and fluid, and this volume collects together his most significant work from over a twenty-year peiod in which he wrestled with the concepts of materialism and culture and their interrelationship. Aside from his more directly theoretical texts, however, case-studies of theatrical naturalism, the Bloomsbury group, advertising, science fiction, and the Welsh novel are also included as illustrations of the method at work. Finally, Williams's identity as an active socialist, rather than simply an academic, is captured by two unambiguously political pieces on the past, present and future of Marxism.
£14.52
Verso Books On Ideology
The publication of For Marx and Reading Capital established Louis Althusser as one of the most influential figures in the Western Marxist tradition. On Ideology charts Althusser's critique of the theoretical system unveiled in his own major works, and his developing practice of philosophy as a "revolutionary weapon."
£14.23
Verso Books What We Don't Talk About: Sex and the Mess of Life
What if we took sex out of the box marked 'special', either the worst or best thing that a human person can experience, and considered it within the complexity of reality? In this extraordinary book, despite longstanding tabloid-style sexual preoccupations with villains and victims, shame and virtue, JoAnn Wypijewski does exactly that.From the HIV crisis to the paedophile priest panic, Woody Allen to Brett Kavanaugh, child pornography to Abu Ghraib, Wypijewski takes the most famous sex panics of the last decades and turns them inside out, weaving what together becomes a searing indictment of modern sexual politics, exposing the myriad ways sex panics and the expansion of the punitive state are intertwined.What emerges is an examination of the multiple ways in which the ever-expanding default language of monsters and victims has contributed to the repressive power of the state. Politics exists in the mess of life. Sex does too, Wypijewski insists and so must sexual politics, to make any sense at all.
£12.02
Verso Books Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City
In 1970, Richard Sennett published the groundbreaking The Uses of Disorder, arguing that the ideal of a planned and ordered city was flawed. Fifty years later, Sennett returns to these still fertile ideas and, alongside campaigner and architect Pablo Sendra, sets out an agenda for the design and ethics of the Open City.The public spaces of our cities are under siege from planners, privatisation and increased surveillance. Our streets are becoming ever more lifeless and ordered. What is to be done? Can disorder be designed? In this provocative essay Sendra and Sennett propose a reorganisation of how we think and plan the social life of our cities. 'Infrastructures of disorder' combine architecture, politics, urban planning and activism in order to develop places that nurture rather than stifle, bring together rather than divide up, remain open to change rather than closed off.
£13.79
Verso Books The Declaration of Independence
Co-author of the groundbreaking Empire and Multitude, Michael Hardt examines The Declaration of Independence and other texts by Thomas Jefferson, arguing that his powerful concept of democracy provides a biting critique of the current American administration. Introducing this collection of Jefferson's writings, Michael Hardt makes a powerful case for re-examining the foundational writings of this American revolutionary in order to reignite the dialogue that first conceived of a "land of the free".
£11.99
Verso Books How I Became A Socialist
William Morris is famous as a designer, poet and artist, but his work as a political thinker and activist is less well known. This collection, the first of his political writings published for nearly 50 years, shows Morris as one of the most original and inspiring socialist intellectuals of his generation.Covering essays and lectures ranging through the relation between art and politics, to his visions for a socialist society and his strident anti-imperialism, this is an essential volume which shows Morris as the engaged and committed socialist that he was.
£12.82
Verso Books Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double
These essays from the 1970s mark the inception of the distinctive project that Jacques Rancière has pursued across forty years, with four interwoven themes: the study of working-class identity, of its philosophical interpretation, of "heretical" knowledge and of the relationship between work and leisure.
£12.82
Verso Books The Intervals of Cinema
The cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book the acclaimed philosopher Jacques Rancière relates cinema to literature and theatre. With literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing its images and its philosophy; and it rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre's dream. Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one feels moved by the spectacle of shadows. Thus for Rancière, the cinema is the always disappointed dream of a language of images.
£12.82
Verso Books The New Populism: Democracy Stares Into the Abyss
The word 'populism' has come to cover all manner of sins. Yet despite the prevalence of its use, it is often difficult to understand what connects its various supposed expressions. From Syriza to Trump and from Podemos to Brexit, the electoral earthquakes of recent years have often been grouped under this term. But what actually defines 'populism'? Is it an ideology, a form of organisation, or a mentality? Marco Revelli seeks to answer this question by getting to grips with the historical dynamics of so-called 'populist' movements. While in the early days of democracy, populism sought to represent classes and social layers who asserted their political role for the first time, in today's post-democratic climate, it instead expresses the grievances of those who had until recently felt that they were included.Having lost their power, the disinherited embrace not a political alternative to -isms like liberalism or socialism, but a populist mood of discontent. The new populism is the 'formless form' that protest and grievance assume in the era of financialisation, in the era where the atomised masses lack voice or organisation. For Revelli, this new populism the child of an age in which the Left has been hollowed out and lost its capacity to offer an alternative.
£16.99
Verso Books The Burmese Labyrinth
In 2011, Burma/Myanmar embarked in a democratic transition from a brutal military rule that culminated four years later, when the first free election in decades saw a landslide for the party of celebrated Nobel prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Yet, even as the international community was celebrating a new dawn, old wars were raging in the northern borderlands and a crisis was emerging in western Arakan State, as the regime intensified its oppression of the vulnerable Muslim Rohingya community. The trigger of the latter was a series of episodes of intercommunal violence between Muslims and Buddhists in 2012, in which the army and police took sides attacking the former. By 2017, the conflict had escalated into a military onslaught against the Rohingya that provoked the most desperate refugee crisis of our times, as over 750,000 of them fled their homes to neighbouring Bangladesh.In The Burmese Labyrinth, journalist Carlos Sardiña Galache, gives the in depth story of the country, combining reportage and history. Burma has always been an uneasy balance between multiple ethnic groups and religions. He examines the deep roots behind the ethnic divisions that go back prior to the colonial period, and so shockingly exploded in recent times. This is a powerful portrait of a nation in perpetual conflict with itself.
£63.00
Verso Books Long Live the Post Horn!
Ellinor, a 35-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she's not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she's ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months.This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Vigdis Hjorth's trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.
£14.03
Verso Books The Indian Ideology
The historiography of modern India is largely a pageant of presumed virtues: harmonious territorial unity, religious impartiality, the miraculous survival of electoral norms in the world's most populous democracy. Even critics of injustices within Indian society still underwrite such claims. But how well does the 'Idea of India' correspond to the realities of the Union?In an iconoclastic intervention, Marxist historian Perry Anderson provides an unforgettable reading of the Subcontinent's passage through Independence and the catastrophe of Partition, the idiosyncratic and corrosive vanities of Gandhi and Nehru, and the close interrelationship of Indian democracy and caste inequality. The Indian Ideology caused uproar on first publication in 2012, not least for breaking with euphemisms for Delhi's occupation of Kashmir. This new, expanded edition includes the author's reply to his critics, an interview with the late Praful Bidwai of the Indian weekly Outlook, and a postscript on India under the rule of Narendra Modi. Anderson considers whether his regime is as much of a break with the practices and thought processes of Congress rule as is generally supposed.
£16.99
Verso Books The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond
Across the globe politics as usual are being rejected and faith in neoliberalism is fracturing beyond repair. Leading political theorist Nancy Fraser, in conversation with Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara, dissects neoliberalism's current crisis and argues that we might wrest new futures from its ruins.The global political, ecological, economic, and social breakdown-symbolized, but not caused, by Trump's election-has destroyed faith that neoliberal capitalism is beneficial to the majority. Fraser explores how this faith was built through the late twentieth century by balancing two central tenets: recognition (who deserves rights) and distribution (who deserves income). When these began to fray, new forms of outsider populist politics emerged on the left and the right. These, Fraser argues, are symptoms of the larger crisis of hegemony for neoliberalism, a moment when, as Gramsci had it, "the old is dying and the new cannot be born."Explored further in an accompanying interview with Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara, Fraser argues that we now have the opportunity to build progressive populism into an emancipatory social force, one that can claim a new hegemony.
£8.68
Verso Books American Homo: Community and Perversity
American Homo offers a sweeping interpretation of the political, cultural and economic struggles of lesbian, gay and bisexual people to reveal how sexual minorities have challenged and changed American society. These provocative essays by long-time activist, writer, and theorist Jeffrey Escoffier tracks the lesbian and gay movements across the contested terrain of American political life. Starting from an urban subculture created by stigmatized and invisible men and women, LGBT movements have had to negotiate the historical tension between the homoeroticism that courses through American culture and virulent outbreaks of homophobic populism. Escoffier explores how every new success-whether it's civil rights, marriage, or cultural recognition-also enables new disciplinary and normalizing forms of domination, and why only the active exercise of democratic rights and participation in radical coalitions allows LGBT people to sustain both the benefits of community and the freedom of sexual perversity.
£13.60
Verso Books Russia without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War
It is impossible to think of Russia today without thinking of Vladimir Putin. More than any other major national leader, he personifies his country in the eyes of the outside world, and dominates Western media coverage. In Russia itself, he is likewise the centre of attention for detractors and supporters alike. But as Tony Wood argues, in order to understand Russia today, the West needs to shake off its obsession with Putin and look at what lies beyond the Kremlin, to see Russia without Putin.In this timely and provocative analysis, Wood looks beyond Putin to explore the profound changes Russia has undergone since 1991. He shows that Russia is not strong but desperately trying to create a space for itself in an increasingly globalized and competitive world, Putin's reign is based on very thin ice; he is highly dependent on a small handful of powerful men who prop him up. Beyond the rich suburbs of Moscow, Russia is a country that is only surviving because of what remains of the soviet economy and culture rather than being held back by it.Wood reconsiders what kind of country has emerged from Russia's post-Soviet transformations. The introduction of the market in the 1990s was a failure than descended into kleptocracy. He shows that the revival of a new cold war is a myth. Russia's incursions into Syria, Ukraine and questions of collusion into western states are a sign of desperation rather than agression. Russia without Putin culminates with reflections on the paths Russia might take in the 21st century following Putin's re-election in March 2018. How will he placate the oligarchs who control the economy and how will he manage his succession, and protect his legacy?
£12.02
Verso Books A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger
John Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers; as a TV presenter he changed the way we looked at art in Ways of Seeing; as a storyteller and political activist he defended the rights and dignity of workers, migrants and the oppressed around the world. In 1953 he wrote: "Far from dragging politics into art, art has dragged me into politics." He remained a revolutionary up to his death in January, 2017. In A Writer of Our Time, Joshua Sperling places Berger's life and works within the historical narrative of postwar Britain and beyond. The book also explores, through the work, the larger questions that vexed a generation: the purpose of art, the nature of creative freedom, the meaning of commitment. Drawing on extensive interviews, close readings and a wealth of archival sources only recently made available, the book brings the many different faces of John Berger together and shows him as one of the most vital, and brilliant, thinkers and storytellers of our time.
£12.82
Verso Books Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the US Military
On April 21, 1971, hundreds of Vietnam veterans fell asleep on the National Mall, wondering whether they would be arrested by daybreak. Veterans had fought the courts for the right to sleep in public while demonstrating against the war. When the Supreme Court denied their petition, they decided to break the law and turned sleep into a form of direct action. During and after the Second World War, military psychiatrists used sleep therapies to treat an epidemic of "combat fatigue." Inducing deep and twilight sleep in clinical settings, they studied the effects of war violence on the mind and developed the techniques of brainwashing that would weaponize both memory and sleep. In the Vietnam War era, radical veterans reclaimed the authority to interpret their own traumatic symptoms-nightmares, flashbacks, insomnia-and pioneered new methods of protest. In Fighting Sleep, Franny Nudelman recounts the struggle over sleep in the postwar world, revealing that sleep was instrumental to the development of military science, professional psychiatry, and antiwar activism. Traversing the fields of military and mainstream psychiatry, popular and institutional film, documentary sound technology, brain warfare, and postwar social movements, she demonstrates that sleep-far from being passive, empty, or null-is a site of contention and a source of political agency.
£14.99