VERSOForeign Rights Catalogue / Spring 2013

About Verso 2

Politics 3

Current Affairs 12

Memoir 14

Counterblasts 17

Philosophy 18

Literary Criticism 25

History 28

Art 32

Backlist Highlights 36

Contents

Verso Books is the largest independent radical publisher in the English-speaking world, with a list that

encompasses trade and academic titles in politics, current affairs, history, philosophy, social sciences

and literature.

Launched by New Left Review in 1970, Verso—the left-hand page—has offices in London and New York

and publishes, on average, 80 books a year.

Its rich backlist includes landmark books by Tariq Ali, Benedict Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Robert

Brenner, Judith Butler, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Mike Davis, David Harvey, Eric

Hobsbawm, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Rebecca Solnit, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Slavoj Žižek.

For a full list of Verso’s titles, please visit our website, www.versobooks.com.

About Verso

2

After the financial apocalypse, neoliberalism rose from the dead—stronger than ever

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to WasteHow Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown

PHILIP MIROWSKI• Combativeaccountbyprominenteconomichistorian

At the onset of the Great Recession, as house prices sank and joblessness soared, many commentators thought that neoliberalism itself was in its death throes. And yet it seems that—post-apocalypse—we’ve woken into a second nightmare more ghastly than the first: a political class still blaming government intervention, a global drive for austerity, stagflation, and exploding sovereign debt crises. The economics profession has weathered the crisis by pumping noise and confusion into our attempts to understand the unfolding disasters.

Philip Mirowski argues that, as in classic studies of cognitive dissonance, neoliberal thought has become so pervasive that any countervailing evidence serves only to further convince disciples of its ultimate truth. Once neoliberalism became a Theory of Everything—a revolutionary account of self, knowledge, information, markets, and government—it could no longer be falsified by mere data from the “real” economy.

In this sharp, witty and deeply informed account—taking no prisoners in his pursuit of “zombie” economists—Mirowski surveys the wreckage of what passes for economic thought, and finally provides the basis for an anti-neoliberal account of the current crisis and our future prospects.

PHILIP MIROWSKI is a historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His many previous books include ScienceMart, Machine Dreams and More Heat than Light, and he appeared in Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary The Trap.

April 2013

384 pages

“It is hard to imagine a historian who was not an economist (as Mirowski is) being able to encompass the economics of the second half of the twentieth century in its

diversity and technicality.” London Review of Books

“Philip Mirowksi is the most imaginative and provocative writer at work today on the recent history of economics.” Boston Globe

POLITICS

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Key theorists discuss the future of communism in New York

The Idea of Communism 2The New York Conference

Edited by SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK • The Idea of Communism,basedontheLondonconference,hassoldover7,000copies

• Livestreamedconferencehadthousandsofviewers;videostobebroadcastontheVersowebsite

The very successful first volume followed the 2009 conference called in response to Alain Badiou’s “communist hypothesis,” where an all-star cast of radical intellectuals put the idea of communism back on the map. This volume brings together papers from the subsequent 2011 New York conference organized by Verso and continues this critical discussion, highlighting the continuing philosophical and political importance of the communist idea, and discussing how to take these essential ideas forward in a world of financial and social turmoil.

Contributors include: Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Susan Buck-Morss, Jodi Dean, Adrian Johnston, François Nicolas, Frank Ruda, Emmanuel Terray and Slavoj Žižek.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. His books include Less Than Nothing; Living in the End Times; First as Tragedy, Then as Farce; In Defense of Lost Causes; six volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.

February 2013

192 pages

Germany: Laika VerlagIndia/Tamil: Aazhi

POLITICS

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Chilling account of the end of party democracy, by the leading political scientist

Ruling the VoidThe Hollowing-Out of Western Democracy

PETER MAIRThroughout the long-established democracies of Western Europe, electoral turnouts are in decline, party membership is shrinking in the major parties, and those who remain loyal partisans are being sapped of enthusiasm. Peter Mair’s new book weighs the impact of these changes, which together show that, after a century of democratic aspiration, electorates are deserting the political arena. He examines the alarming parallel development that has seen Europe’s political elites remodel themselves as a homogeneous professional class, withdrawing into state institutions that offer relative stability in a world of fickle voters. Meanwhile, non-democratic agencies and practices proliferate and gain credibility—not least among them the European Union itself, an organization whose notorious “democratic deficit” reflects the deliberate intentions of those who founded the EU, an association that now contributes to the depoliticization of the member states.

Ruling the Void offers an authoritative and chilling assessment of the prospects for popular political representation today, not only in the varied democracies of Europe but throughout the developed world.

PETER MAIR (1951–2011) was one of the leading political scientists of his generation. He studied at University College Dublin and the University of Leiden, and worked at universities in Ireland, the U.K., the Netherlands and Italy, finally becoming Professor of Comparative Politics at the European University Institute, Florence. His books include Party System Change and, with Stefano Bartolini, Identity, Competition and Electoral Availability.

August 2013

160 pages

“The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so

lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.” Peter Mair, from the introduction to Ruling the Void

POLITICS

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How the new global movements are putting forward a radical conception of democracy

They Can’t Represent Us!Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy

MARINA SITRIN and DARIO AZZELLINI Foreword by EDUARDO GALEANO

• Athrough-writtenbookthatdrawsoninterviewswithactivistsacrosstheworld

Here is one of the first books to assert that mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States share an agenda—to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today.

Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela, Japan, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is both one of the most expansive portraits of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, and an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Athens today. The new movements put forward the idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.

DARIO AZZELLINI is a lecturer at the Institute for Sociology at the Johannes Kepler University in Austria. He has published several books, among them The Business of War, about the privatization of military services. He edited, with Immanuel Ness, Ours to Master and to Own. His recent film documentary Comuna Under Construction examines worker councils in Venezuela.

MARINA SITRIN was a key member of the Occupy Wall Street movement and is a postdoctoral fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization and Social Change. She is the author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina, as well as editor of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina and coeditor of the forthcoming Insurgent Democracies: Latin America’s New Powers.

July 2013

192 pages

Praise for Marina Sitrin’s Horizontalism

“This book is riveting, moving, and profoundly important for those who want to know what revolution in our time might look like.” Rebecca Solnit

Praise for Dario Azzellini’s Ours to Master and to Own

“The most substantial and comprehensive work on workers’ control and self-management today.” Gary Younge, Guardian and Nation

POLITICS

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The renowned philosopher finds a utopian future in worldwide protests

The Year of Dreaming DangerouslySLAVOJ ŽIŽEKCall it the year of dreaming dangerously: in 2011 we all witnessed (and participated in) a series of shattering events. Emancipatory dreams mobilized protesters in New York, Tahrir Square, London and Athens —and there were the obscure destructive dreams propelling the mass murderer Breivik and racist populists all around the world, from the Netherlands and Hungary to Arizona. The subterranean work of dissatisfaction is continuing: rage is accumulating and a new wave of revolts will follow. Why? Because the events of 2011 were signs from the future: we should analyze them as limited, distorted (sometimes even perverted) fragments of a utopian future which lies dormant in the present as its hidden potential.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. His books include Less Than Nothing; Living in the End Times; First as Tragedy, Then as Farce; In Defense of Lost Causes; six volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.

September 2012

128 pages

Brazil: BoitempoChina: Guangxi Normal UP

Croatia: FrakturaCzech Republic: Rybka Publishers

Germany: S. FischerGreece: Scripta

India/Tamil: AazhiItaly: Ponte Alle Grazie

Japan: KoshishaKorea: Mirae N Co.

Netherlands: BoomPoland: Krytyka

Russia: EuropeSpain & Latin America: Akal

Sweden: TankekraftTurkey: Encore

“Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the ’80s: the thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard.” Observer

“Invigorating, entertaining and expanding enquiring minds around the world.” Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

POLITICS

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Rising thinker on the resurgence of the communist idea

The Communist HorizonJODI DEAN• PartofVerso’sPocketCommunismseries

In this new title in Verso’s Pocket Communism series, Jodi Dean argues for the continued force of communism today. It should be our Pole star, the focus of our journey.

With communism as our horizon, the field of possibilities for revolutionary theory and practice starts to change shape, and barriers to action fall away. Our combined strength replaces our separate weaknesses, our collective desire replaces individual drive, and mobilized wills replace passive indecision. When the illusion that capitalism is the only reality dissolves, anything is possible. She shows that the global anti-capitalist movement associated with Occupy Wall Street gets its bearings from the communist horizon as it expresses the intensity of collective desires to organize against the corporate and financial elite.

Jodi Dean presents nothing less than a manifesto for a new politics and a new collectivity.

JODI DEAN teaches political theory in upstate New York. She has authored or edited eleven books, including Zizek’s Politics; Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies; and Blog Theory.

October 2012

192 pages

Germany: Laika Verlag

Praise for Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies

“Jodi’s sharp analysis of the impasses of the left is also a kind of requiem for much of the 2.0 bluster of the last decade.” Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism

“Jodi Dean’s new book provides what we have all been waiting for: the authentic theoretical analysis of how ideology functions in today’s global capitalism. Her diagnosis of ‘communicative capitalism’ discloses how our ‘really-existing democracies’ curtail prospects of radical emancipatory politics. To anyone who continues to dwell in illusions about liberal democracy, one should simply say: ‘Hey, didn’t you read Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies?’” Slavoj Žižek

POLITICS

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Acclaimed author presents a decade’s research toward creating an anthropology of the future

The Future as Cultural FactEssays on the Global Condition

ARJUN APPADURAIThis major collection of essays, a sequel to Modernity at Large (1996), is the product of ten years’ research and writing, constituting an important contribution to globalization studies. Appadurai takes a broad analytical look at the genealogies of the present era of globalization through essays on violence, commodification, nationalism, terror and materiality. Alongside a discussion of these wider debates, Appadurai situates India at the heart of his work, offering writing based on first-hand research among urban slum-dwellers in Mumbai, in which he examines their struggle to achieve equity, recognition and self-governance in conditions of extreme inequality. Finally, in his work on design, planning, finance and poverty, Appadurai embraces the “politics of hope” and lays the foundations for a revitalized, and urgent, anthropology of the future.

ARJUN APPADURAI is Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is the author of many books and articles, including Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization; The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective; and Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger.

February 2013

336 pages

Praise for Fear of Small Numbers

“Arjun Appadurai is already known as the author of striking new formulations which have greatly illuminated contemporary global developments.” Charles Taylor, author of Modern Social Imaginaries

“These are important new thoughts from an influential thinker of our times.” Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University, New York

“This sorrowful, insightful book comes from a sobered visionary of cultural globalisation.” Red Pepper

POLITICS

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Manifesto on the urban commons from the acclaimed theorist

Rebel CitiesFrom the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution

DAVID HARVEYCities have long been the pivotal sites of political revolutions, where deeper currents of social and political change are fleshed out. Consequently, they have been the subject of much utopian thinking about alternatives. But at the same time, they are also the centers of capital accumulation, and therefore the frontline for struggles over who has the right to the city, and who dictates the quality and organization of daily life. Is it the developers and financiers, or the people?

Rebel Cities places the city at the center of both capital and class struggles, looking at sites ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, and from New York City to São Paulo. By exploring how cities might be reorganized in more socially-just and ecologically-sane ways, David Harvey argues that cities can become the centers for anti-capitalist struggle too.

DAVID HARVEY teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is the author of many books, including Social Justice and the City, The Condition of Postmodernity, The Limits to Capital, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Spaces of Global Capitalism, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, and The Enigma of Capital.

April 2012

112 pages

Brazil: Martins Editora LivrariaGermany: SuhrkampGreece: KapsimiItaly: Il SaggiatoreJapan: SakuhinshaKorea: EidosPoland: Bec Zmiana FoundationSerbia: MediterranSpain & Latin America: AkalTurkey: Metis

“David Harvey provoked a revolution in his field and has inspired a generation of radical intellectuals.” Naomi Klein

“Harvey is a scholarly radical; his writing is free of journalistic clichés, full of facts and carefully thought-through ideas.” Richard Sennett

Praise for Limits to Capital

“A magisterial work.” Fredric Jameson

POLITICS

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POLITICS

June 2012

224 pages

Genes, Stems and CellsBioscience’s Promethean Promises

HILARY ROSE and STEVEN ROSEOur fates lie in our genes and not in the stars, said James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. But Watson could not have predicted the scale of the industry now dedicated to this new frontier. Since the launch of the multibillion-dollar Human Genome Project, the biosciences have promised miracle cures and radical new ways of understanding who we are. But where is the new world we were promised?

In Genes, Cells, and Brains, feminist sociologist Hilary Rose and neuroscientist Steven Rose take on the bioscience industry and its claims. Examining the rivalries between public and private sequencers, the establishment of biobanks, and the rise of stem cell research, they ask why the promised cornucopia of health benefits has failed to emerge. Has bioethics simply become an enterprise? As bodies become increasingly commodified, perhaps the failure to deliver on these promises lies in genomics itself.

HILARY ROSE is Emerita Professor at Bradford University and Visiting Professor of

Sociology at the London School of Economics. STEVEN ROSE is Emeritus Professor of Life Sciences at the Open University. Long active in the politics of sciences, their joint books include Science and Society and Alas Poor Darwin.

March 2013224 pages

France: n/aPoland: Krytyka Politiczna

Feminism’s MovementsFrom Women’s Liberation to Identity Politics to Anti-Capitalism

NANCY FRASERNancy Fraser’s powerful new book documents the “movements of feminism” and the shifts in the feminist imaginary since the 1970s.

Fraser follows the history of feminism from the ferment of the New Left, during which “Second Wave” feminism emerged as a struggle for women’s liberation alongside other social movements, to its emersion in identity politics following the decline in its initial utopian energies. Alongside this detailed history, Fraser recognizes the need for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism to respond to the crisis in neoliberalism. She argues for a feminism that could join other egalitarian movements in struggles aimed at subjecting capitalism to democratic control, while retrieving the core utopian insights of feminism’s earlier phases.

NANCY FRASER is Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research and holder of a Chaire Blaise Pascal at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. Her books include Redistribution or Recognition; Adding Insult to Injury; Justice Interruptus and Unruly Practices.

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CURRENT AFFAIRS

June 2012

320 pages

Scattered SandThe Story of China’s Rural Migrants

HSIAO-HUNG PAIPreface by GREGOR BENTON

Each year, 200 million workers from China’s vast rural interior travel between cities and regions in search of employment: the largest human migration in history. This indispensable army of labor contributes half of China’s GDP, but is an unorganized workforce—“scattered sand”—and the most marginalized and impoverished group of workers in the country.

For two years, the award-winning journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai traveled across China to uncover the exploitation of workers at locations as diverse as Olympic construction sites and brick kilns in the Yellow River region, the factories of the Pearl River Delta and the suicide-ridden Foxconn complex. She witnessed AIDS-afflicted families and towns; recorded acts of labor militancy; and was reunited with long-lost relatives, estranged since her mother’s family fled for Taiwan during the Civil War. What she finds is a peasantry expected to sacrifice itself for the sake of national glory—just as it was under Mao.

HSIAO-HUNG PAI is a freelance journalist, whose report on the Morecambe Bay tragedy for the Guardian was made into the film Ghosts. Her book on undocumented Chinese immigrants in Britain, Chinese Whispers, was shortlisted for the Orwell Book Prize in 2009. She lives in London.

July 2012

256 pages

Taiwan: Faces Publications

The Oil RoadA Journey to the Heart of the Oil Economy

JAMES MARRIOTT and MIKA MINIO-PALUELLOOpening in 2006 after ten years in the making, British Petroleum’s $4 billion pipeline, running from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean, has become an icon of globalization. Over a thousand miles long, it weaves a route around the Russian and Iranian borders, transporting oil and gas to hungry Western markets.

Bringing to bear a wealth of expertise on their subject, the authors look at the reality behind the pipeline’s gleaming façade. Traveling along its route, they trace the shadowy forces and institutions behind it, meeting whistleblowers, security forces, local villagers and fishermen; in doing so, they expose a story of cracked coatings, new arms races and displaced local communities. A compelling travelogue, The Oil Road explores the hidden history of an iconic project that is also a metaphor for our age.

JAMES MARRIOTT and MIKA MINIO-PALUELLO are part of the award-winning environmental social justice group PLATFORM (platformlondon.org). Artist, writer, activist and PLATFORM co-director, Marriott is the coauthor of The Next Gulf: London, Washington and the Oil Conflict in Nigeria. Minio-Paluello is currently leading PLATFORM’s work on banks, oil and climate change. They live in London.

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CURRENT AFFAIRS

April 2012

208 pages

Irregular ArmyHow the War on Terror Brought Neo-Nazis, Gang Members and Criminals Into the US Military

MATT KENNARDSince the launch of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—now the longest wars in American history—the US military has struggled to recruit troops. It has responded, as Matt Kennard’s explosive investigative report makes clear, by opening its doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, gang members, the mentally ill, and criminals. Based on first-hand years of research, Irregular Army includes extensive interviews with extremist veterans and leaders of far-right hate groups who spoke openly of their eagerness to have their followers acquire military training for a coming domestic race war. As a report commissioned by the Department of Defense itself put it, “Effectively, the military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy pertaining to extremism.”

MATT KENNARD works for the Financial Times in Washington, DC and London and has written for Salon, the Chicago Tribune and the Guardian.

March 2013

160 pages

The Fall of Muammar GaddafiNATO’s War in Libya

HUGH ROBERTSThe campaign against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi was the first NATO war in North Africa since Algeria’s FLN defeated France. NATO claimed that it acted on behalf of the people of Libya to prevent the indiscriminate slaughter of the civilian populace. Yet Hugh Roberts, one of the most widely respected scholars of North Africa, reveals these justifications to be baseless. Meanwhile, the bombing campaign, combined with civil war, has caused perhaps as many as 25,000 deaths, many more injuries, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands.

Hugh Roberts provides an informed and balanced account of Gaddafi’s rise to power and decades-long rule, detailing the West’s shifting policies, which isolated him, embraced him, and then bombed him. Whose interests were really at stake? What are the prospects for the National Transitional Council? Roberts’s study is the first to put the Libyan war into a context that includes Afghanistan, Iraq and the complex balance of forces in North Africa.

HUGH ROBERTS is a Senior Research Fellow of the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the Secretary of the Society for Algerian Studies and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of North African Studies. He lives in London and Cairo.

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Searing, frank memoir of childhood in the German concentration camps

Boy 30529A Memoir

FELIx WEINBERG“Anyone who survived the exterminations camps must have an untypical story to tell. The typical camp story of the millions ended in death ... We, the few who survived the war and the majority who perished in the camps, did not use and would not have understood terms such as ‘holocaust’ or ‘death march’. These were coined later, by outsiders.”

Boy 30529 tells the story of a boy who at the age of twelve lost everything: hope, family, and even his own identity. As Nazi persecutions grew in intensity, young Felix’s father went to England to obtain travel papers to allow the family to emigrate from Czechoslovakia. But they never made it out of Prague. Felix spent the next three years in a series of concentration camps—Terezín, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Blechhammer, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald—and survived the Death March from Blechhammer in 1945. The book is a meditation on memory and of how to forget, and how the Holocaust remains an event at the center of historical debate.

FELIx WEINBERG came to Britain after the war and lived with his father. Despite having no formal education since the age of twelve, he graduated as an external student and later become the first Professor of Combustion Physics at Imperial College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and lives in London.

April 2013

192 pages

“All those who care about the proper documenting of this horrendous era must be grateful to Felix Weinberg for giving us this insightful and ultimately uplifting account.” Suzanne Bardgett, Imperial War Museum

MEMOIR

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Haunting, beautifully written and deeply moving memoir of a young Israeli soldier

The Girl Who Stole My HolocaustNotes from an Israeli Life

NOAM CHAYUTTranslated By Tal Haran

“She took from me the belief that absolute evil exists in this world, and the belief that I was fighting against it. For that girl, I embodied absolute evil . . . Since then I have been left without my Holocaust, and since then everything in my life has assumed a new meaning: belongingness is blurred, pride is lacking, belief is faltering, contrition is heightening, forgiveness is being born.”

The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust is the deeply moving memoir of Chayut’s journey from eager Zionist conscript on the front line of Operation Defensive Shield to leading campaigner against the Israeli occupation. As he attempts to make sense of his own life as well as his place within the wider conflict around him, he slowly starts to question his soldier’s calling, Israel’s justifications for invasion, and the ever-present problem of historical victimhood.

Noam Chayut’s exploration of a young soldier’s life is one of the most compelling memoirs to emerge from Israel for a long time.

NOAM CHAYUT was born in 1979 and joined the Nachel Brigade as a conscript in 1998. He swiftly rose to the rank of officer and saw action during Operation Defensive Shield. He left the army in 2003 and later joined Breaking the Silence, a platform for former soldiers to record their testimonies about life in the military. His memoir was published in Israel in 2010

June 2013

288 pages

N/A: Hebrew, German, Japanese, Palestinian

MEMOIR

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A brave account of a soldier who refused to return to Afghanistan

Soldier BoxWhy I Won’t Go Back to War

JOE GLENTON“I looked around my cell and saw the sheet of paper taped to the door at chest height. It listed everything in the room, chair, bed, soldier box … For a moment I thought it meant the cell itself; a box to put soldiers in.”

When the War on Terror began, Briton Joe Glenton felt compelled to serve his nation. He passed through basic training and deployed to Afghanistan in 2006. What he saw overseas left him disillusioned, and he returned home manifesting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and becoming increasingly politicized.

When he refused to return for a second tour, he was denied his right to object and called “a coward and a malingerer.” He went absent without leave and left the country, returning later to the U.K. voluntarily to campaign against the wars. The military accused him of desertion and threatened years in prison.

Solder Box tells the story of Glenton’s extraordinary journey from a promising soldier to a rebel against what he came to see as unjustified military action.

JOE GLENTON was born in Norwich, Great Britain, in 1982. He joined the British Army in 2004. Since his release he has campaigned against the wars and has written for the Guardian, Mirror, New Internationalist, Military History Monthly, and Counterfire. He is currently studying International Relations.

June 2013

320 pages

“It takes as much courage to stand up against the Army as it does to go to war. History is made by people prepared to make that kind of sacrifice.” Tony Benn

“Above the sound of gunfire it is his story that deserves to be heard.” John Rees, coauthor of The People’s History of London

MEMOIR

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Scathing and hilarious takedown of a frontman for the rich and powerful

The FrontmanBono (In the Name of Power)

HARRY BROWNECelebrity philanthropy comes in many guises, but no single figure better encapsulates its delusions, pretensions and wrongheadedness than U2’s iconic frontman, Bono—a fact neither sunglasses nor leather pants can hide. More than a mere philanthropist—indeed, he lags behind many of his peers when it comes to parting with his own money—Bono is better described as an advocate, and has become an unwitting symbol of the complacent wealthy Western elite.

The Frontman examines Bono’s role in Irish investments before the economic collapse; his paternalistic and often bullying advocacy of neoliberal solutions in Africa; his multinational business interests; and his hobnobbing with Paul Wolfowitz and shock-doctrine economist Jeffrey Sachs. Carefully dissecting the rhetoric and actions of Bono the political operator, The Frontman shows him to be an ambassador for imperial exploitation, a man who has turned his attention to a world of savage injustice, inequality and exploitation—and helped make it worse.

HARRY BROWNE is a Lecturer in the School of Media at the Dublin Institute of Technology as well as an activist and journalist who has written for the Irish Times, Sunday Times, Irish Daily Mail, Evening Herald, Sunday Tribune and Counterpunch. He is the author of Hammered by the Irish: How the Pitstop Ploughshares Disabled a U.S. War Plane—With Ireland’s Blessing.

May 2013

176 pages

“I genuinely see myself as a traveling salesman. I think that’s what I do. I sell songs door-to-door on tour. I sell ideas like debt relief, and like all salesmen,

I’m a bit of an opportunist and I see Africa as great opportunity.” Bono

COUNTERBLASTS

Counterblasts is a new Verso series that aims to revive the tradition of polemical writing inaugurated by Puritan and leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century.

In a period of conformity where politicians, media barons and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it’s time to revive the tradition. Verso’s Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of empire and Capital.

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Capitalism’s colonization of every hour in the day

24/7Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

JONATHAN CRARY24/7 explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding, non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates twenty-four hours of every day and demands our constant activity, eroding forms of community, political expression, and the fabric of everyday life. Jonathan Crary examines the way this interminable non-time blurs any separation between an intensified, ubiquitous consumerism and the strategies of control and surveillance. He argues that human sleep and dreaming provide exemplary, if elusive, models for other thresholds at which society might defend or protect itself.

JONATHAN CRARY is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. His books include Techniques of the Observer and Suspensions of Perception.

June 2013

144 pages

Praise for Techniques of the Observer

“Nimbly interweaving the histories of science, technology, philosophy, popular culture, and the visual arts, Jonathan Crary provides a stunning challenge to conventional wisdom about the epochal transformation of visual culture in the nineteenth century. Techniques of the Observer will be a vital resource for anyone concerned with the complex interaction of technological modernization and aesthetic modernism.” Martin Jay, University of California at Berkeley

PHILOSOPHY

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Passionate defense of “the political” by the author of The Democratic Paradox

AgonisticsThinking the World Politically

CHANTAL MOUFFEPolitical 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?

In Agonistics, Mouffe develops her philosophy, taking particular interest in international relations, strategies for radical politics and the politics of artistic practices. In a series of coruscating essays, she engages with cosmopolitanism, post-operaism, and theories of multiple modernities to argue in favor of a multipolar world with a real cultural and political pluralism.

CHANTAL MOUFFE is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Westminster in London. She has taught and researched at many universities around the world and is a corresponding member of the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. Her previous books include The Democratic Paradox, The Return of the Political, The Dimensions of Radical Democracy, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, and, coauthored with Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

July 2013

224 pages

“Mouffe represents a position that every serious student of contemporary political thought must acknowledge and come to terms with.” Philosophers’ Magazine

PHILOSOPHY

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A provocative intellectual assault on the Subalternists’ foundational work

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of CapitalismVIVEK CHIBBERFor much of the twentieth century, critical analysis of the developing world drew upon theories born of the Enlightenment tradition, such as liberalism and Marxism. But, over the past two decades, such theories have been widely criticized by scholars as Eurocentric, ahistorical and statist. A call has gone out for a new framework, free of the Enlightenment baggage and attuned to the particularities of the non-Western world. Postcolonial theory has gained wide acceptance among historians, anthropologists and area specialists as just such a framework—within which, the most influential body of work has undoubtedly been the Subaltern Studies series. In this carefully honed dissection, Vivek Chibber offers an assessment of the main arguments that these theorists have developed since its inception. Through a close analysis of the works of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyan Pandey and others, Chibber examines whether they offer a plausible framework for understanding the postcolonial world. The book critically examines key subalternist arguments about modernity, hegemony, the universalization of capital, colonial nationalism, subaltern agency, peasant consciousness and concepts such as historicism, the fragment, and Eurocentrism.

VIVEK CHIBBER is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University. He has contributed to, among others, the Socialist Register, American Journal of Sociology, Boston Review and New Left Review. His book Locked In Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India won the 2005 Barrington Moore Book Award and was one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles of 2004.

February 2013

256 pages

Praise for Locked in Place

“A sustained analytical argument presented in writing that is crystal-clear and entirely free of jargon, with the historical narrative of ‘what was’ tautly balanced with counterfactual ‘what might have been.’” Robert Hunter Wade, European Journal of Sociology

“Vivek Chibber’s book is exceptionally clear, fresh, empirically rich, and analytically tight. It clears some conventional cobwebs in thinking about developmental states. It should be read widely.” Ronald J. Herring, Perspectives on Politics

“We have every reason to be grateful for this path-breaking work.” Achin Vanaik, New Left Review

PHILOSOPHY

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PHILOSOPHY

November 2012384 pages

THE MAPPING SERIESN E W E D I T I O N

Mapping the NationEdited by GOPAL BALAKRISHNANIntroduced by BENEDICT ANDERSONIn the two decades since Samuel P. Huntington proposed his influential and troubling “clash of civilizations” thesis, nationalism has only continued to puzzle and frustrate commentators, policy analysts and political theorists. No consensus exists concerning its identity, genesis or future.

Opening with powerful statements by Lord Acton and Otto Bauer—the classic liberal and socialist positions—Mapping the Nation presents a wealth of thought on this issue: the debate between Ernest Gellner and Miroslav Hroch; Gopal Balakrishnan’s critique of Benedict Anderson’s seminal Imagined Communities; Partha Chatterjee on the limitations of the Enlightenment approach to nationhood; and contributions from Michael Mann, Eric Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn and Jürgen Habermas.

GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN is the author of The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt and editor of Debating “Empire.” A member of the New Left Review editorial board, he teaches Contemporary Theory at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

November 2012

336 pages

Turkey: Everest

N E W E D I T I O N

Mapping Subaltern Studies and the PostcolonialEdited by VINAYAK CHATURVEDIInspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the history of subaltern classes, the authors in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial sought to contest the elite histories of Indian nationalists by adopting the paradigm of “history from below.” Later on, the project shifted from its social history origins by drawing upon an eclectic group of thinkers that included Edward Said, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. This book provides a comprehensive balance sheet of the project and its developments, including Ranajit Guha’s original subaltern studies manifesto, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Spivak.

VINAYAK CHATURVEDI is a Professor of History at the University of California in Irvine.

N E W E D I T I O N

Mapping IdeologyEdited by SLAVOJ ŽIŽEKFor a long time, the term “ideology” was in disrepute, having become associated with such unfashionable notions as fundamental truth and the eternal verities. The tide has turned, and recent years have seen a revival of interest in the questions that ideology poses to social and cultural theory and to political practice.

Including Slavoj Žižek’s study of the development of the concept from Marx to the present; assessments of the contributions of Lukács and the Frankfurt School by Terry Eagleton, Peter Dews and Seyla Benhabib; and essays by Adorno, Lacan and Althusser, Mapping Ideology is an invaluable guide to the most dynamic field in cultural theory. November 2012

352 pages

Brazil: Nova FrontieraChina: Nanjing UP

Germany: LaikaJapan: SeidoshaTurkey: Dipnot

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Slavoj Žižek’s masterwork on the Hegelian legacy

Less Than NothingHegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK• Major(andmassive)philosophicalstatementfromtheacclaimedthinker

For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, whose influence each new thinker tries in vain to escape: whether in the name of the pre-rational Will, the social process of production, or the contingency of individual existence. Hegel’s absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the dominant philosopher of the epochal historical transition to modernity; a period with which our own time shares startling similarities.

Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new transition. In Less Than Nothing, the pinnacle publication of a distinguished career, Slavoj Žižek argues that it is imperative that we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Žižek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought—Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a Professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.

April 2012

1,200 pages

Brazil: BoltempoChina: Nanjing UPGermany: N/AItaly: Ponte alle GrazieJapan: KoshishaKorea: SaemulgyulSpain & Latin America: AkalTurkey: Encore

“The thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard ... to witness Žižek in full flight is a wonderful and at times alarming experience, part philosophical tightropewalk, part performance-art marathon, part intellectual roller-coaster ride.” Sean O’Hagan, Observer

PHILOSOPHY

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PHILOSOPHY

NEW IN PAPERBACKLiving in the End TimesŽižek analyzes the end of the world at the hands of the “four riders of the apocalypse”2011 • 432 pages

Albania: Logos-A Brazil: Boitempo; China: Law Press China; Croatia: Fraktura; France: Flammarion; Germany: Laika; Greece: Scripta; Italy: Ponte alle Grazie; India/Tamil: Aazhi; Japan: Kokubunsha; Korea: Ghil; Portugal: Relógio D’Água; Russia: Europe Publishing House; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Turkey: Metis

NEW EDITIONThe Sublime Object of IdeologyŽižek’s first book, a provocative and original exploration of human agency in a postmodern world.2008 • 272 pages

Albania: Institute for Political Studies China: Central Compilation & Translation; Croatia: MegazimZa Polit; Denmark: Hans Reitzel’s Forlag; Estonia: Vagabund; Finland: Apeiron; India & South Asia: Navayana; India/Tamil: Aazhi; Israel: Resling; Italy: Ponte alle Grazie; Japan: Kawade Shobo Shinsha; Kerala: Kerala Bhasha Institute; Korea: Saemulgyul; Netherlands: Han’s Reitzel’s; Norway: Spartacus; Poland: Arkzin/Wydawnictwo Uniw. Wroclawskiego; Romania: Editura ART; Spain & Latin America: Siglo xxI; Sweden: Glanta; Turkey: Metis

NEW EDITIONThe Fragile AbsoluteOr, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?Žižek argues that the subversive core of the Christian legacy forms the foundation of a politics of universal emancipation.2008 • 208 pages

China: Jiangsu; Denmark: Gyldendal; France: Flammarion; Germany: Volk und Welt; Greece: Scripta; Hungary: Typotext; Italy: Transeuropa; Japan: Seidosha; Poland: Krytyka Politiczna; Spain & Latin America: Pre-Textos;

First As Tragedy, Then As FarceFrom the tragedy of 9/11 to the even more terrifying farce of the financial meltdown — plus a defense of Badiou’s communist hypothesis.2009 • 168 pages

Alabania: Dialectical Materialism Collective Arabic: NCT; Brazil: Boitempo; Bulgaria: St. Kliment; China: China Social Science Press; Czech Republic: Rybka; Croatia: Fraktura; France: Flammarion; Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag; Greece: Scripta; Hungary: Eszmélet Alapitvany; India & South Asia: Navayana; Italy: Ponte alle Grazie; Japan: Chikuma Shobo; Korea: Changbi; Netherlands: Boom; Poland: Krytyki Politycznej; Portugal: Relogio; Russia: Europa Publishing House; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Sweden: TankeKraft Förlag

NEW EDITIONThe Ticklish SubjectThe Absent Centre of Political OntologyŽižek unearths the core of the Cartesian subject to find the indispensable reference point for any genuinely emancipatory project.2008 • 432 pages

Alabania: Dialectical Materialism Collective China: Jiangsu; France: Flammarion; Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag; India & South Asia: ABS; Italy: Raffaello Cortina; Japan: Seidosha; Korea: B-Books; Portugal: RelÓgio; Serbia: Book Trading Co.; Spain & Latin America: Paidós; Turkey: Epos

NEW EDITIONRevolution at the GatesŽižek on Lenin: The 1917 WritingsŽižek puts Lenin’s 1917 writings in their historical context, while his extensive Afterword tackles the key question of whether this man can be reinvented in our era of “cultural capitalism.”2011 • 352 pages

Brazil: Boitempo; France: Aden; Germany: Suhrkamp; Italy: Feltrinelli; Korea: Gyoyangin; Spain & Latin America: Debate

NEW IN PAPERBACKIn Defense of Lost CausesAdrenaline-fueled manifesto for universal values by “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.”2009 • 528 pages

Brazil: Boitempo; China: China Social Science Press; France: Flammarion; Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag; Greece: Kedros; Italy: Ponte alle Grazie; Japan: Seidosha; Korea: Greenbee; Poland: Krytyka Politiczna; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Turkey: Epos Yayinlari

NEW EDITIONThe Plague of FantasiesŽižek’s take on the relations between fantasy and ideology, and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images surrounding us.2008 • 272 pages

China: Jiangsu; Italy: Il Saggiatore; Japan: Seidosha; Korea: In-gan-sa-rang; Russia: Institute of Applied Psychology; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Taiwan: Laureate Book Co.; Turkey: Monokl

NEW EDITIONDid Somebody Say TotalitarianismFour Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a NotionŽižek looks at totalitarianism in a way that Wittgenstein would approve of—finding it a cobweb of family resemblances. 2011 • 288 pages

Brazil: Boitempo; China: Jiangsu; Czech Republic: Transit; France: Amsterdam; Germany: Laika; Greece: Scripta; Italy: Cittá Aperta; Japan: Seidosha; Korea: Saemulgyul; Poland: Inter Esse; Spain & Latin America: Pre-Textos; Turkey: Epos

Also available by Slavoj Žižek

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PHILOSOPHY

Welcome to the Desert of the RealSlavoj Žižek160 pages

Arabic: El Ain; Brazil: Boitempo; China: Beijing Pengfeiyili; Denmark: Introite; Finland: Apeiron; France: Flammarion; Greek: Scripta; Japan: Seidosha; Korea: Jaeum & Movem; Kerala: DC Books; Netherlands: Boom; Portugal: Relogio; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Sweden: Glanta; Taiwan: Rye Field

Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, PopulismErnesto Laclau208 pages

Brazil: Paz e Terra; Germany: Das Argument; Greece: Sychroma Themata Press; Japan: Tsuge Shobo; Spain: Siglo xxI

Ethics–Politics–SubjectivityEssays on Derrida, Levinas & Contemporary French ThoughtSimon Critchley240 pages

The Cultural TurnSelected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998Fredric Jameson128 pages

Argentina: Manantial; Brazil: Record; China:China Social Science Press; Israel: Resling; Japan: Sakuhinsha; Korea: Hyunsil; Lithuania: Lithuanian Writers’ Union; Slovenia: Studia Humanitatis; Spain: Peninsula; Turkey: Dost Kitabevi

Design and CrimeHal Foster192 pages

Brazil: Editora UFMG China: Shandong Pictorial; Croatia: V.B.Z.; France: Les Prairies Ordinaires; Germany: Tiamat; Italy: Postmedia; Japan: Heibonsha; Korea: Sizirak; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Turkey: Iletisim

Postmodern GeographiesThe Reassertion of Space in Critical Social TheoryEdward W. Soja228 pages

Brazil: Zahar; China: Commercial Press; Japan: Seidosha; Korea: Vision & Language Publications

Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of ResistanceSimon Critchley176 pages

Croatia: Izdanja; France: Francois Bourin; Germany: Diaphanes; Greece: Ekkremes; Korea: Munhakdongne; Spain: Marbot; Turkey: Metis

Ethics of the Real: Kant and LacanAlenka Zupančič288 pages

Italy: Orthotes; Japan: Kawadeshobo; Korea: B-Books; Latin America: Prometeo Libros; Turkey: Epos

Walter BenjaminOr, Towards a Revolutionary CriticismTerry Eagleton204 pages

Brazil: Omni Editora; China: Yilin Press; Germany: Laika; Greece: Ypsilon; Japan: Keiso Shobo; Korea: E&B Plus; Spain & Latin America: Catedra; Turkey: Agora

The Democratic ParadoxChantal Mouffe448 pages

Bulgaria: Critique and Humanism; China: Hei Longjiang Press; Germany: Verlag Turia & Kant; Japan: Ibunsha; Korea: Inkan Sarang; Poland: Dolnoslaska Szkola Wyzsza; Spain & Latin America: Gedisa; Taiwan: Chuliu; Turkey: Epos

Brecht and MethodFredric Jameson280 pages

Brazil: Cosac Naify; Italy: Cronopio; Japan: Getsuyo-sha; Spain: Manantial; Turkey: Habitus

Contingency, Hegemony, UniversalityContemporary Dialogues on the LeftSlavoj Žižek, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler330 pages

China: Jiangsu People’s Publishing House; Croatia: Naklada Jesenski I Turk; Germany: Turia and Kant; Italy: Laterza; Japan: Seidosha; Korea: B-Books; Poland: Fundacja Krakowska Alternatywa; Romania: Tact; Spain & Latin America: Fondo de Cultura Economica

Radical Thinkers Set 4

Radical Thinkers

Theodor Adorno In Search of Wagner

Radical Thinkers

Louis Althusser & Étienne Balibar Reading Capital

Radical Thinkers

Jean Baudrillard The Transparency of Evil Essays on Extreme Phenomena

Radical Thinkers

Walter Benjamin The Origin of German Tragic Drama

160 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-344-5 340 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-347-6 200 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-345-2 256 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-348-3

Radical Thinkers

Simon Critchley Ethics —

Politics — SubjectivityEssays on Derrida, Levinas, & Contemporary French Thought

Radical Thinkers

Guy Debord

Panegyric

Radical Thinkers

Terry Eagleton Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism

Radical Thinkers

Fredric Jameson The Cultural Tu

1983–1998urn Selected Writings on the Postmodern,

240 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-351-3 192 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-353-7 204 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-350-6 128 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-349-0

Radical Thinkers

Georg Lukács Lenin A Study on the Unity of His Thought

Radical Thinkers

Chantal Mouffe The Democratic Paradox

Radical Thinkers

Gillian Rose Hegel Contra Sociology

Radical Thinkers

Paul Virilio War and Cinema The Logistics of Perception

104 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-352-0 448 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-355-1 261 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-354-4 200 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-346-9

Each volume: Paperback – $15.95 / £8.99 / $20CAN—

12 Volume set available at the discounted price of $149.95 / £85 / $187.50CAN

2,512 pages – 5 × 7.75 inchesISBN-13: 978-1-84467-392-6

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LITERARY CRITICISM

The formation of an unorthodox literary critic

Distant ReadingFRANCO MORETTIHow does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions.

From the evolutionary model of “Modern European Literature,” through the geo-cultural insights of “Conjectures of World Literature” and “Planet Hollywood,” to the quantitative findings of “Style, inc.” and the abstract patterns of “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” the book follows two decades of conceptual development, organizing them around the metaphor of “distant reading,” that has come to define—well beyond the wildest expectations of its author—a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.

FRANCO MORETTI teaches literature at Stanford, where he directs the Literary Lab. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World, Modern Epic, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, and Graphs, Maps, Trees as well as chief editor of The Novel.

May 2013

224 pages

Italy: n/a

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On the problems of translation in literary study

Against World LiteratureOn the Politics of Untranslatability

EMILY APTERThe book engages in a polemical critique of recent efforts to revive World Literature models of literary studies (Moretti, Casanova, etc.) on the grounds that they construct their curricula on an assumption of translatability. As a result, incommensurability and what Apter calls the “untranslatable” are insufficiently built into the literary heuristic. Drawing on philosophies of translation developed by de Man, Derrida, Sam Weber, Barbara Johnson, Abdelfattah Kilito and Édouard Glissant, as well as on the way in which “the untranslatable” is given substance in the context of Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, the aim is to activate Untranslatability as a theoretical fulcrum of Comparative Literature with bearing on approaches to world literature, literary world systems and literary history, the politics of periodization, the translation of philosophy and theory, the bounds of non-secular proscription and cultural sanction, free versus privatized authorial property, and the poetics of translational difference.

EMILY APTER is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her published works include The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature and Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects.

March 2013

240 pages

Praise for The Translation Zone

“This is a terrific book and a great pleasure to read … What is so unusual is the impressive breadth and range of Apter’s reading in literatures across the globe. This is a book that will make readers want to rethink the limits of their own disciplines.” Robert J. C. Young, Oxford University, author of Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction

“The Translation Zone offers a richly detailed history of Comparative Literature, a field volatile from the first, looking to contrary horizons, and never more so than at the present moment.” Wai Chee Dimock, author of Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time

LITERARY CRITICISM

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LITERARY CRITICISM

Representing CapitalA Reading of Volume OneJameson grasps Marx’s work as a representational problem and an experiment in constructing the figure or model of the inexpressible phenomenon that is capital.2011 • 176 pagesChina: China Renmin UP; Japan: Sakuhinsha; Korea: Ghill; Germany: Laika; Italy: Bruno Mondadori; Latin America: Fondo de Cultura Economica; Spain: Lengua de Trapo; Turkey: Sel

The Hegel VariationsOn the Phenomenology of SpiritAn epic of joyful and explosive insurrection from the poet of youth rebellion.2011 • 136 pagesChina: China Renmin UP; Germany: Verlag Turia & Kant; Japan: Seidosha; Korea: Ghil; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Turkey: Ithaki

FREDRIC JAMESON is the Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University and winner of the 2008 Holberg Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, The Ideologies of Theory and The Hegel Variations.

“Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction.” Terry Eagleton

NEW IN PAPERBACKValences of the DialecticFredric Jameson returns to the philosophy of the dialectic in a grand and nuanced study of the concept and those who have developed it.2010 • 640 pagesChina: China Social Science Press; Germany: Laika; Korea: Ghil; Latin America: Eterna Cadencia; Turkey: Ithaki

NEW EDITION Fables of AggressionWyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist“Jameson’s little book on Wyndham Lewis is an important work, as much for its treatment of Lewis himself as for its contribution to an understanding of the ideology of modernism, and to an understanding of a socio-political-psychoanalytic theory of criticism.” Edward Said

2008 • 190 pages

Archaeologies of the FutureThe Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions“Among the most stunning studies of utopia and science fiction ever produced. It is a vast treasure trove of a book, crammed with brilliant aperçus.” London Review of Books2007 • 431 pagesChina: Yilin; France: Max Milo; Greece: Motibo; Italy: Feltrinelli; Japan: Sakuhinsha; Korea: Ghil; Poland: Jagiellonian University Press; Serbia: Sluzbeni Glasnik; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Turkey: Metis

The Modernist PapersA tour de force of analysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2007 • 426 pages China: China Remnin University Press; France: Beaux-Arts de Paris; India & South Asia: ABS

NEW EDITION Ideologies of TheoryUpdated and available for the first time in a single volume, Ideologies of Theory brings together theoretical essays that span Fredric Jameson’s long career as a critic.

2008 • 680 pages

Italy: Galaad; Spain & Latin America: Eterna Cadencia; Turkey: Monokl

A Singular ModernityEssay on the Ontology of the Present“Jameson is, as always … entrancing, never short of illuminating juxtapositions or entertaining insights.” Radical Philosophy2002 • 250 pagesBrazil: Record; Greece: Alexandreia; Italy: Rcs/Sansoni; Japan: Kobushi Shobo; Korea: Munhakdongne; Spain & Latin America: Gedisa; Turkey: Epos

Available by Fredric Jameson

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Who—and what—are the Bourgeois?

The BourgeoisBetween History and Literature

FRANCO MORETTI“The bourgeois ... Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. ‘I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals,’ wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois ‘opinions and ideals’—what are they?”

Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature—a major new analysis of the once-dominant culture and its literary decline and fall. Moretti’s gallery of individual portraits is entwined with the analysis of specific keywords—“useful” and “earnest,” “efficiency,” “influence,” “comfort,” “roba”—and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. From the “working master” of the opening chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the “national malformations” of the Southern and Eastern periphery, and the radical self-critique of Ibsen’s twelve-play cycle, the book charts the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and for its current irrelevance.

FRANCO MORETTI teaches literature at Stanford, where he directs the Literary Lab. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World, Modern Epic, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, and Graphs, Maps, Trees as well as chief editor of The Novel.

May 2013

224 pages

Italy: n/a

“The great iconoclast of literary criticism” John Sutherland, Guardian

“It’s a rare literary critic who attracts so much public attention, and there’s a good reason: few are as hell-bent on rethinking the way we talk about literature.” Times Literary Supplement

“Moretti, a mythopoeic figure, generates around himself a dense network of folklore and apocrypha.” N+1

“Moretti is already famous in bookish circles for his data-centric approach to novels, which he graphs, maps, and charts . . . if his new methods catch on, they could change the way we look at literary history.” Wired

“Distant reading might prove to be a powerful tool for studying literature.” New York Times

HISTORY

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From 9/11 to the Arab Spring—the decade of living dangerously

N E W I N P A P E R B A C K

The Revenge of HistoryThe Battle for the Twenty-First Century

SEUMAS MILNEThe Revenge of History is a corrective to the accepted account of the first decade of the twenty-first century. In 2001, Tony Blair claimed that anyone who questioned the dominance of the neoliberal economy and the doctrine of military intervention was “proved wrong.” Ten years later, who looks stupid now? Throughout this period, Milne has been writing the dissenting opinion, offering an alternative perspective on the big historical developments and giving a different account of what really went on.

SEUMAS MILNE is a regular columnist for the Guardian and its former Comments Editor. He is the author of The Enemy Within and coauthor of Beyond the Casino Economy.

June 2013

400 pages

“Reading Seumas Milne, one often has a feeling of physical relief: finally someone not only sees the truth but articulates it with thrilling erudition and moral clarity. Tracking a decade of ruinous lies from the right and

unheeded warnings from the left, this is a book with an urgent message: it’s time to win more than arguments.” Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine

Praise for Enemy Within

“Seumas Milne’s masterly investigation ... is one of the finest political exposés in our time.” John Pilger

“An astonishing book” The Nation

“A real-life thriller” Evening Standard

HISTORY

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HISTORY

September 2012

368 pages

The Making of Global CapitalismLEO PANITCH and SAM GINDINPanitch and Gindin’s monumental study offers a significant rethinking of the development of global capitalism. Transcending classical theories of interimperialist rivalry and the false dichotomy between states and markets in the neoliberal era, this book produces an exceptionally rich account of postwar global capitalism to the present day. Focussing on the American state, Panitch and Gindin argue that its distinctiveness rests in its capacity to identify the interests of its own capital with that of capital in general, while restructuring other states to the end of spreading capitalist social relations and preventing economic crises from interrupting capital’s globalizing tendencies. Examining recent economic crises, the authors identify social conflict occurring within, rather than between, states, producing political fault-lines replete with possibilities for the emergence of new movements to transcend capitalist markets and states.

LEO PANITCH is Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy in the Department of Political Science at York University, Toronto. Editor of the Socialist Register since 1985, his books include Working Class Politics in Crisis; The End of Parliamentary Socialism; and Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination.

SAM GINDIN is the former Research Director of the Canadian Autoworkers Union and Packer Visiting Chair in Social Justice at York University. Among his many publications, he is the author (with Greg Albo and Leo Panitch) of In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives.

January 2013

304 pages

The Poorer NationsA Possible History of the Global South

VIJAY PRASHADIn The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad provided an intellectual history of the Third World and told the story of the rise and fall of the Non-Aligned Movement.

With The Poorer Nations, Prashad takes up the story where he left off. Since the ’70s, the countries of the Global South have struggled to express themselves politically. Prashad analyzes the failures of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of the BRIC countries, the Group of 15, the World Social Forum, the Latin American revolutionary revival—in short, all the efforts to create alternatives to the neoliberal project advanced by the US and its allies, among whom number the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and other economic instruments of the powerful.

A true global history, The Poorer Nations is informed by interviews with leading players such as senior UN officials, as well as Prashad’s pioneering research into archives of the Julius Nyerere–led South Commission.

VIJAY PRASHAD is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of a number of books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and Arab Spring, Libyan Winter.

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HISTORY

March 2013

576 pages

China: Shanghai People’s PublishingSpain and Latin America: Siglo xxI

Sweden: Arkiv

VERSO WORLD HISTORY SERIESPERRY ANDERSON is the author of, among other books, Spectrum, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Considerations on Western Marxism, English Questions, The Origins of Postmodernity, and The New Old World. He teaches history at UCLA and is on the editorial board of New Left Review.

March 2013

304 pages

China: Shanghai People’s PublishingGermany: Suhrkamp

Latin America: Siglo xxISweden: Arkiv

Passages from Antiquity to FeudalismThe rise of the modern absolutist monarchies in Europe constitutes in many ways the birth of the modern historical epoch. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, the companion volume to Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State, is a sustained exercise in historical sociology to root the development of absolutism in the diverse routes taken from the slave-based societies of Ancient Greece and Rome to fully-fledged feudalism. In the course of this study Anderson vindicates and the refines the explanatory power of a Marxist conception of history, whilst casting a fascinating light on Greece, Rome, the Germanic invasions, nomadic society, and the different patterns of the evolution of feudalism in Northern, Mediterranean, Eastern and Western Europe.

Lineages of the Absolutist StateThe political nature of Absolutism has long been a subject of controversy within historical materialism. Developing considerations advanced in Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, this book situates the Absolutist states of the early modern epoch against the prior background of European feudalism. It is divided into two parts. The first discusses the overall structures of Absolutism as a state-system in Western Europe, from the Renaissance onwards. It then looks in turn at the trajectory of each of the specific Absolutist states in the dominant countries of the West—Spain, France, England and Sweden, set off against the case of Italy, where no major indigenous Absolutism developed.

The second part of the work sketches a comparative prospect of Absolutism in Eastern Europe. The peculiarities, as well as affinities, of Eastern Absolutism as a distinct type of royal state, are examined. The work ends with some observations on the special position occupied by European development within universal history.

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A new reading of the philosophy of contemporary art by the author of The Politics of Time

Anywhere or Not at AllThe Philosophy of Contemporary Art

PETER OSBORNEContemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that “contemporary art is postconceptual art,” the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism.

PETER OSBORNE is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and founding Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), now at Kingston University London. He is a long-serving member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time, Philosophy in Cultural Theory, Conceptual Art, and Marx.

June 2013

256 pages

ART

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A graphic history of a poem that became an inspiration to immigrant workers in New York

Masks of AnarchyThe History of a Radical Poem, from Percy Shelley to the Triangle Factory Fire

MICHAEL DEMSONIllustrated by SUMMER McCLINTON

Masks of Anarchy tells the extraordinary story of Shelley‘s “The Masque of Anarchy,” its conception in Italy, its suppression in England, and how it became a rallying cry for workers across the Atlantic a century later. “Shake your chains to earth like dew,” it implores. “Ye are many—they are few.”

In 1819, British troops attacked a peaceful crowd of demonstrators near Manchester, killing and maiming hundreds. News of the Peterloo Massacre, as it came to be known, traveled to the young English poet Percy Shelley, then living in Italy, who immediately sat down at his desk and penned one of the greatest political poems in the English language. His words would later inspire figures as wide-ranging as Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi—and also Pauline Newman, the woman the New York Times called the “New Joan of Arc” in 1907.

Newman was a Jewish immigrant who grew up in the tenements of New York City’s Lower East Side, worked in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, and came to be one of the leading organizers—and the first female organizer—of one of America’s most powerful unions, the International Ladies’ Garments Workers’ Union. Marching with tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in the streets, Newman found Shelley’s poetry a perennial source of inspiration.

MICHAEL DEMSON is a Professor of English at Sam Houston State University in Texas.

SUMMER MCCLINTON is a New York–based illustrator whose work has appeared in The Beats.

July 2013

128 pages

ART

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ART

March 2013

224 pages

The Spectacle of DisintegrationSituationist Passages Out of the Twenty-First Century

McKENZIE WARK• Wonderfulgraphicfold-outcoverbyacclaimedartistKevinPyle

Following his acclaimed history of the Situationist International up until the late sixties, The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark returns with a history of the late work of the Situationists. Wark maps the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse to the integrated to what he calls the disintegrating spectacle. The Spectacle of Disintegration takes the reader through the critique of political aesthetics of former Situationist T. J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René Vienet’s earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sangunetti’s pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice-Becker Ho’s account of the anonymous language of the Romany, and Guy Debord’s late films and his surprising work as a game designer.

At once an extraordinary counter-history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets, The Spectacle of Disintegration recalls the hidden journeys taken in the attempt to leave the twentieth century, and plots an exit to the twenty–first.

McKENZIE WARK is the author of The Beach Beneath the Street; A Hacker Manifesto; Gamer Theory; 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International; and other books. He teaches at the New School for Social Research and the Eugene Land College in New York City.

July 2013

480 pages

Japan: Kousakusha

Derek BaileyAnd the Story of Free Improvisation

BEN WATSON This brilliant biography of the cult guitar player will likely cause you to abandon everything you thought you knew about jazz improvisation, post-punk and the avant-garde. Derek Bailey was at the top of his profession as a dance band and record-session guitarist when, in the early 1960s, he began playing an uncompromisingly abstract form of music. Today his anti-idiom of “Free Improvisation” has become the lingua franca of the “avant” scene, with Pat Metheny, John Zorn, David Sylvian and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore among his admirers.

BEN WATSON is a writer on music and culture. He is the author of numerous books including Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, Art, Class & Cleavage and Adorno for Revolutionaries.

“The ideal biographer of Derek Bailey.” John Fordham, Guardian

“I am an enthusiast for the Watson method and I’m prepared to follow him, even to places where I wouldn’t under other circumstances go ... His attack, his singularity. His indecent decency.” Iain Sinclair

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ART

September 2011

224 pages

Brazil: COSAC Naify China: Shandong Pictorial

France: Les Prairies Ordinaires Israel: Pitom

Italy: Postmedia Japan: Kajima Institute

Korea: HyunmumSpain & Latin America: Turner

Turkey: Iletisim

The Art-Architecture ComplexHAL FOSTERHal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. He delineates a “global style” of architecture, as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, analogous to the “international style” of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies. More than any art, today’s global style conveys the look of modernity, both its dreams and its delusions. In these ways Foster demonstrates that the “art-architecture complex” is a key indicator of broader social and economic trajectories and in urgent need of analysis and debate.

HAL FOSTER is Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. A coeditor of October magazine and a number of books, he is the editor of The Anti-Aesthetic as well as the author of Design and Crime, Recording, The Return of the Real, and Compulsive Beauty.

July 2012

368 pages

100 color illustrations

Slovenia: Maska Ljubljana

Artificial HellsParticipatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

CLAIRE BISHOPFor over a decade, conceptual and performance art has been dominated by participatory art. Its champions, such as French curator Nicolas Bourriaud (who invented the term “relational aesthetics” to describe it) and American art historian Grant Kester, believe that by encouraging an audience to join in, the artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art. The book follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of the participatory aesthetic, in both Europe and America.

Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to expose the political and aesthetic limitations of this work. In Artificial Hells she not only scrutinizes the claims for democracy and emancipation that the artists and critics make for the work, but also questions the turn to ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such participatory and collaborative art.

CLAIRE BISHOP is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York. She is the author of Installation Art: A Critical History and editor of Participation. In 2008 she co-curated the exhibition “Double Agent” at the ICA. She is a regular contributor to Artforum, October, Tate Etc, IDEA, and other international art magazines.

BENEDICT ANDERSONIMAGINED COMMUNITIESReflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New edition 2006)

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?

Audio, English: Tantor Arabic: Cadmus; Brazil: Companhia das Letras; Catalan: Afers; China: Shanghai People’s Publishing; Czech Republic: Karolinum; Denmark: Roskilde; Finland: Vastapaino; France: La Découverte; Georgia: Language and Culture; Germany: Campus Verlag; Greece: Nefeli; Hungary: L’Harmattan; Israel: The Open University of Israel; Japan: Shosekikobo Hayama; Khmer: Centre for Khmer Studies Korea: Ghil; Mexico: Fondo Cultura Economica; Netherlands: Jan Mets; Norway: Spartacus; Philippines: Anvil; Portugal: 70 lda; Romania: Art; Russia: Kanon; Serbia: Skolska Knija; Slovenia: Humanitas; Spain: Fondo de Cultura Economica; Sweden: Daidalos; Taiwan: China Times Publishing; Turkey: Metis; Ukraine: Krytyka

UNDER THREE FLAGSAnarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (2007)

Benedict Anderson continues the historical and theoretical project begun in Imagined Communities, by providing a compelling exploration of fin-de-siècle politics and culture that spans the Caribbean, Imperial Europe and the South China Sea. He depicts the dense intertwining of radical internationalism and anti-colonial nationalism, a process that gave birth to the politics of early anti-globalization.

Brazil: Unicamp; France: La Découverte; Italy: Manifesto Libri; Indonesia: Marjin Kiri; Japan: NTT; Korea: Ghil; Philippines: Anvil; Slovenia: Založba Sophia; Spain: Akal; Turkey: Metis

PERRY ANDERSONTHE NEW OLD WORLD(2011)

The New Old World offers a critical portrait of the European Union, the core continental countries within it, and the issue of its further expansion into Asia.

China: Shanghai People’s Publishing House; France: Agone;

Germany: Berenberg; Italy: Baldini Castoldi Dalai; Korea: Ghil; Spain & Latin America: Akal

THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY (1998)Trenchant and panoramic, The Origins of Postmodernity traces the genesis, consolidation and consequences of the notion of the postmodern.

Brazil: Zahar; China: China Social Sciences Press; France: Les Prairies Ordinaires; Japan: Kobushi Shobo; Korea: Hyunsil Culture Studies; Portugal: Edicioes 70; Romania: Idea Design and Print Spain: Anagrama; Sweden: Daidalos; Taiwan: Linking; Turkey: Iletisim

GIOVANNI ARRIGHITHE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURYMoney, Power and the Origins of Our Times (New edition 2010)

The Long Twentieth Century traces the epochal shifts in the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Now a classic of history and sociology, the book is fully updated in the light of recent events.

Brazil: Contraponto; China: Jiangsu; Hong Kong: OUP; Italy: Il Saggiatore; Japan: Sakuhinsha; Korea: Greenbee; Russia: Territory of the Future Fund; Slovenia: Založba Sophia; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Sweden: Daidalos; Turkey: Imge Kitabevi Yayinlari

ADAM SMITH IN BEIJING Lineages of the 21st Century (2009)

In the late eighteenth century, the political economist Adam Smith predicted an eventual equalization of power between the conquering West and the conquered non-West. Demonstrating Smith’s continued relevance to understanding China’s extraordinary rise, Arrighi examines the events that have brought it about, and the increasing dependence of US wealth and power on Chinese imports and purchases of US Treasury bonds.

Brazil: Boitempo; China: SSAP; France: Max Milo; Germany: VSA; Italy: Feltrinelli; Japan: Sakuhinsha; Korea: Ghil; Poland: Krytyki Politycznej; Russia: State University Higher School of Economics Publishing House; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Turkey: Yordam

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ALAIN BADIOUFIVE LESSONS ON WAGNER (2010)

With an Afterword by Slavoj ŽIŽEK Translated by Susan Spitzer

In this major new work, Alain Badiou, radical philosopher and keen Wagner enthusiast, offers a detailed reading of the critical responses to the composer’s work, which include Adorno’s writings on the composer and Wagner’s recuperation by Nazism as well as more recent readings by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and others. Slavoj Žižek provides an afterword, and both philosophers make a passionate case for re-examining the relevance of Wagner to the contemporary world.

China: Henan; France: Nous; Germany: Diaphanes; Italy: Asterios; Japan: Seidosha; Korea: Book in the Gap; Spain & Latin America: Akal

WALDEN BELLOTHE FOOD WARS (2009)

The hike in global food prices has pushed hundreds of millions more people into poverty, and sparked riots and protests in the Middle East, Africa and the Americas. Walden Bello, the leading writer and activist on the global South, provides a penetrating analysis of the various causes: not just the rise in energy costs, but also the IMF and WTO-led restructuring of the worldwide agricultural system. Charting the evolution of the current crisis, Bello also offers a way forward: the principle of food sovereignty, allowing the developing world to protect and sustain a diverse range of crops.

Arabic: NCT; Brazil: Leopardo; France: Carnets Nord; Germany: Assoziation A; Italy: Nuovi Mondi Media; Japan: Sakuhinsha; Korea: The Soup Publishing; Poland: Ksiazka i Prasa; Philippines: Anvil; Spain: Virus; Sweden: TankeKraft

JUDITH BUTLERFRAMES OF WARWhen Is Life Grievable? (2010)

In this urgent response to violence, racism and increasingly dominant methods of coercion, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of state violence, a process integral to how the West engages in war. She calls for a reconceptualization of the Left, one united in opposition and resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of state violence.

Brazil: Record; Czech Republic: Grimmus; France: La Découverte; Germany: Campus; India & South Asia: Seagull;

Italy: Fandango; Japan: Chikuma Shobo; Korea: Ghil; Poland: Ksiazka I Prasa; Spain & Latin America: Paidós; Sweden: TankeKraft; Turkey: Yapi Kredi; Vietnam: Hoasen University

PRECARIOUS LIFEThe Powers of Mourning and Violence (2006)

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.

China: Henan; France: Amsterdam; Germany: Suhrkamp; Greece: Nissos; Italy: Postmedia; Japan: Ibunsha; Korea: Kyungsung University Press; Spain & Latin America: Paidós; Sweden: Tankekraft; Turkey: Metis

MIKE DAVISBUDA’S WAGONA Brief History of the Car Bomb (2008)

In this disturbing history, Mike Davis traces the car bomb’s worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies—particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan—in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. Davis argues that the incessant impact of car bombs is changing cities and urban lifestyle.

France: La Découverte; Germany: Assoziation A; India & South Asia: Seagull; Italy: Einaudi; Japan: Kawade Shobo; Korea: Strategy & Culture; Poland: Hal!art; Slovenia: Maska; Spain & Latin America: Ediciones de Intervencion Cultural; Sweden: Leopard; Turkey: Agora

PLANET OF SLUMS (2007)

In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neo-liberal theory.

Arabic: NCT Egypt; Brazil: Boitempo; China: Shanghai Sanhui; Croatia: V.B.Z.; France: La Découverte; Germany: Assoziation A; Indonesia: Lafadl; Italy: Feltrinelli; Japan: Akashi; Korea: Dolbegae; Poland: Ksiazka i Prasa; Slovenia: Založba *Cf; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Sweden: Arkiv; Turkey: Metis

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CITY OF QUARTZExcavating the Future in Los Angeles (New edition 2006)

In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs LA’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West—a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity.

Brazil: Boitempo; China: Shanghai People’s Publishing; France: La Découverte; Germany: Assoziation A; Italy: Manifesto Libri; Japan: Seidosha; Spain & Latin America: Lengua De Trapo; Sweden: Arkiv

COSTAS DOUZINAS WITH SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK (EDS.)

THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM(2010)

Responding to Alain Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’, the leading political philosophers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to take part in a landmark conference to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common.

This volume brings together their discussions on the philosophical and political import of the communist idea, highlighting both its continuing significance and the need to reconfigure the concept within a world marked by havoc and crisis.

China: China Social Science Press; France: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes; Germany: Laika; Greece: Nissos; Italy: Derive Approdi; Japan: Suiseisha; Korea: Greenbee; Spain & Latin America: Paidós; Sweden: TankeKraft; Turkey: Ayrinti

TERRY EAGLETONIDEOLOGYAn Introduction (New edition 2007)

This accessible introduction unravels the varied meanings of ideology, from the Enlightenment to postmodernism, and outlines the major strands of Marxist thought, as well as that of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and the poststructuralists.

Brazil: Boitempo; China: Commercial Press; Germany: Metzler; Greece: Ypsilon; India & South Asia: ABS; Israel: Resling; Italy: Fazi; Japan: Heibonsha; Macedonia: Templum;

Romania: ART; Spain & Latin America: Paidós; Turkey: Ayrinti

PAUL FEYERABENDAGAINST METHOD (New edition 2010)

Paul Feyerabend’s acclaimed work, which sparked controversy and continues to fuel fierce debate, shows the deficiencies of many widespread ideas about the nature of knowledge. He argues that the only feasible explanation of any scientific success is a historical account, and that anarchism must now replace rationalism in the theory of knowledge. This updated edition of this classic text contains a new foreword by Ian Hacking, a leading contemporary philosopher of science.

Brazil: UNESP; Bulgaria: Naonka I Izkuistvo; China: China Times; Croatia: DAF; Czech Republic: Aurora; France: Seuil; Germany: Suhrkamp; Greece: Sychrona Themata; Hungary: Atlantisz; Italy: Feltrinelli; Japan: Shinyosha; Netherlands: Lemniscaat; Portugal: Relogio; Russia: AST; Serbia: Veselin Maslesa; Slovenia: Humanitas; Spain: Tecnos; Sweden: Arkiv; Turkey: Ayrinti

FAREWELL TO REASON(1988)

Farewell to Reason offers a vigorous challenge to the scientific rationalism that underlies Western ideals of “progress” and “development,” whose damaging social and ecological consequences are now widely recognized.

Brazil: UNESP; China: Jiangsu; France: Seuil; Germany: Suhrkamp; Greece: Ipodomi; Hungary: Atlantisz; Italy: Armando; Japan: Hosei; Korea: Hangilsa; Russia: AST; Spain: Critica; Turkey: Ayrinti

NORMAN G. FINKELSTEINTHE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRYReflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New edition 2003)

Thoroughly researched, this is a disturbing and powerful argument indicting with rigor and honesty those who exploit the tragedy of the Holocaust for their own personal political and financial gain. It concludes that the Holocaust Industry has become an outright extortion racket.

Arabic: Dar Al-Adab; Brazil: Record; Croatia: Zlatko Hasanbegovic; Denmark: Host & Son; Estonia: Mati Nigul; France: La Fabrique; Germany: Piper; Greece: Ekdoseis

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to Eikostou Protou; Israel: Resling; Italy: Rizzoli; Japan: Sankosha; Lithuania: D.K.I; Netherlands: Mets en Schilt; Norway: Spartacus; Poland: Oficyna Wydawnicza Volumen; Portugal: Antigona; Romania: Antet; Spain & Latin America: Siglo xxI; Sweden: Ordfront; Turkey: Kirmizi

RICHARD GOTTBRITAIN’S EMPIREResistance, Repression and Revolt (2011)

Britain’s Empire reveals how British rule was imposed as a

military operation and maintained as a military dictatorship.

Gott traces the rebellions and resistance of subject peoples

whose stories are excluded from traditional accounts of empire.

Latin America: Capital Intelectual

CHRIS HARMANA PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE WORLDFrom the Stone Age to the New Millennium (2008)

“I have had many people ask me if there is a book which does for world history what my book A People’s History of the United States does for this country. I always respond that I know of only one book that accomplishes this extremely difficult task, and that is Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World. It is an indispensable volume on my reference bookshelf.” Howard Zinn

Arabic: NCT; France: La Découverte; Germany: Laika; Greece: Motibo; Korea: n/a; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Thailand: Kobfai; Turkey: Yordam

DAVID HARVEYA COMPANION TO MARx’S CAPITAL(2010)

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 foremost Marx scholars. Based on his recent lectures, this current volume aims to bring that depth of learning to a broader audience, guiding first-time readers through a fascinating and deeply rewarding text. A Companion to Marx’s Capital offers fresh, original and sometimes critical interpretations of a book that changed the course of history and, as Harvey intimates, may do so again.

Brazil: Boitempo; China: Shanghai Translation ; France: La ville brûle; Germany: VSA; Italy: VoLo; Japan: Sakuhinsha; Korea: Changbi; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Turkey: Metis

THE LIMITS TO CAPITAL (New edition 2007)

Widely praised as an exciting, insightful exposition and development of Marx’s critique of political economy, Harvey updates his classic text with a discussion of the turmoil in world markets today. In his analyses of “fictitious capital” and “uneven geographical development,” Harvey takes the reader step by step through layers of crisis formation, beginning with Marx’s controversial argument concerning the falling rate of profit, moving through crises of credit and finance, and closing with a timely analysis of geo-political and geographical considerations. The Limits to Capital provides one of the best theoretical guides to the contradictory forms found in the historical and geographical dynamics of capitalist development.

China: Shanghai Sanhui Culture & Press; Greece: Parisianou; Turkey: Tan Kitabevi

ERNESTO LACLAUON POPULIST REASON (2007)

In this highly original work Ernesto Laclau continues the philosophical and political exploration initiated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, focusing on the construction of popular identities and how “the people” emerges as a collective actor. This book is essential reading for all those interested in the question of political identities in present-day societies.

China: Jiangsu; France: Seuil; Germany: Laika; Hungary: Noran; Italy: Laterza; Japan: Akashi; Korea: Humanitas; Poland: University of Lower Silesia; Romania: CA Publishing; Slovenia: Založba Sophia; Turkey: Epos

WITH CHANTAL MOUFFE

HEGEMONY AND SOCIALIST STRATEGYTowards a Radical Democratic Politics (New edition 2001)

This key text of the new “post-Marxism” criticizes the persistent essentialism of the Marxist tradition from Plekhanov via Lenin and Gramsci to Althusser, and proposes a radical renovation of theory and practice.

Argentina: Fondo de Cultura Economica; China: Hei

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Longjiong; France: Les Solitaires Intempestifs; Germany: Passagen; Israel: Reisling; Italy: Il Nuovo Melangolo; Japan: Chikuma Shobo; Korea: Humanitas; Poland: University of Lower Silesia Press; Serbia: Stvarnost; Spain: Siglo xxI; Sweden: Vertigo; Taiwan: Yuan-Liou, Turkey: Birikim

TIMOTHY MITCHELLCARBON DEMOCRACYPolitical Power in the Age of Oil

Timothy Mitchell rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the work of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world. He begins with the history of coal, which gave those who produced it the power to shut down energy systems, a power they used to build the first mass democracies. Oil offered the West an alternative source of energy, and a different form of politics. It helped create a denatured political life whose central object, the economy, appeared capable of infinite growth. It created democratic forces dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. And it left us with an impoverished political practice, incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fueled collapse of the ecological order.

France: La Decouverte; Russia: Delo; Turkey: Acilim

GÖRAN THERBORNFROM MARxISM TO POST-MARxISM? (2010)

In this pithy and panoramic work—both stimulating for the specialist and accessible to the general reader—one of the world’s leading social theorists, Göran Therborn, traces the trajectory of Marxism in the twentieth century and anticipates its legacy for radical thought in the twenty-first.

Brazil: Boitempo; China: SSAP; Hungary: Eszmélet Alapitvany; Korea: Ghil; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Turkey: Dipnot

VERSO BOOKSTHE VERSO BOOK OF DISSENTFrom Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad (2010)

With a preface by Tariq Ali

Across the ages and in every continent, people have struggled against those in power and raised their voices in protest—and

this unrivalled compendium brings many of them together. This anthology, global in scope, presents the voices of dissent through the ages: poems and songs, pamphlets and speeches, plays and manifestos. The Verso Book of Dissent will become an invaluable tool, reminding today’s citizens that these traditions will never die.

Greece: Enalios // Oceanos; Italy: Fandango; Korea: Sam & Parkers; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Thailand: Kobfai

ELLEN MEIKSINS WOODEMPIRE OF CAPITAL (2005)

This book brings into sharp relief the nature of today’s new capitalist empire, in which the political reach of imperial power cannot match its economic hegemony. The global economy is administered, not by a global state, but by a system of multiple local states, policed by the most disproportionately powerful military force the world has ever known and enforced according to a new military doctrine of war without end in purpose or time.

Brazil: Boitempo; China: Shanghai Trans. Co.; Finland: Vastapaino; France: Lux; Germany: Laika; Greece: Kapsimi; Italy: Meltemi; Japan: Kinokuniya; Korea: Sang Hyoung Mun Ja; Spain: Ediciones de Intervencion Cultural; Turkey: Yordam

THE ORIGIN OF CAPITALISM (New edition 2002)

In this revised and updated edition, Ellen Meiksins Wood challenges most existing accounts of capitalism’s origins, arguing that they make its emergence seem natural and inevitable rather than recognizing its distinctive attributes as a social system.

China: China Renmin; Czech Republic: Svoboda; France: Lux; Germany: Laika; Korea: Kyungsung; Turkey: Yordam

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