verso.cat.FRA. 2012

VERSO Foreign Rights Catalogue / Spring 2013

Contents About Verso

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Politics 3 Current Affairs

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Memoir 14 Counterblasts 17 Philosophy 18 Literary Criticism

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History 28 Art 32 Backlist Highlights

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About Verso 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.

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POLITICS

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

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

PHILIP MIROWSKI • Combative account by prominent economic historian 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.

April 2013 384 pages

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.

“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

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politics

Key theorists discuss the future of communism in New York

The Idea of Communism 2 The New York Conference

Edited by SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK • The Idea of Communism, based on the London conference, has sold over 7,000 copies • Livestreamed conference had thousands of viewers; videos to be broadcast on the Verso website 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.

February 2013 192 pages

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

Germany: Laika Verlag India/Tamil: Aazhi

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.

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politics

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

Ruling the Void The Hollowing-Out of Western Democracy

PETER MAIR Throughout 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

August 2013 160 pages

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.

“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

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politics

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 • A through-written book that draws on interviews with activists across the world 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.

July 2013 192 pages

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

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

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

Praise for Dario Azzellini’s Ours to

recent film documentary Comuna Under Construction examines worker

Master and to Own

councils in Venezuela.

“The most substantial and

MARINA SITRIN was a key member of the Occupy Wall Street movement

comprehensive work on workers’ control and self-management today.”

Gary Younge, Guardian and Nation

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.

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politics

The renowned philosopher finds a utopian future in worldwide protests

The Year of Dreaming Dangerously SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK Call 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: Boitempo China: Guangxi Normal UP Croatia: Fraktura Czech Republic: Rybka Publishers Germany: S. Fischer Greece: Scripta India/Tamil: Aazhi Italy: Ponte Alle Grazie Japan: Koshisha Korea: Mirae N Co. Netherlands: Boom Poland: Krytyka Russia: Europe Spain & Latin America: Akal Sweden: Tankekraft Turkey: 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

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politics

Rising thinker on the resurgence of the communist idea

The Communist Horizon JODI DEAN • Part of Verso’s Pocket Communism series 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 October 2012 192 pages

a new collectivity.

Jodi Dean teaches political theory in upstate New York. She has authored or edited eleven books, including Zizek’s Politics; Democracy

Germany: Laika Verlag

and Other Neoliberal Fantasies; and Blog Theory.

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

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politics

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

The Future as Cultural Fact Essays on the Global Condition

ARJUN APPADURAI This 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

February 2013 336 pages

Perspective; and Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger.

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

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politics

Manifesto on the urban commons from the acclaimed theorist

Rebel Cities From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution

DAVID HARVEY Cities 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.

April 2012 112 pages

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

Brazil: Martins Editora Livraria Germany: Suhrkamp Greece: Kapsimi Italy: Il Saggiatore Japan: Sakuhinsha Korea: Eidos Poland: Bec Zmiana Foundation Serbia: Mediterran Spain & Latin America: Akal Turkey: Metis

History of Neoliberalism, Spaces of Global Capitalism, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, and The Enigma of Capital.

“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

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politics

Genes, Stems and Cells Bioscience’s Promethean Promises

HILARY ROSE and STEVEN ROSE Our 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.

June 2012 224 pages

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.

Feminism’s Movements From Women’s Liberation to Identity Politics to Anti-Capitalism

NANCY FRASER Nancy 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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March 2013 224 pages France: n/a Poland: Krytyka Politiczna

current affairs

Scattered Sand The Story of China’s Rural Migrants

Hsiao-Hung Pai Preface 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 June 2012

and the suicide-ridden Foxconn complex. She witnessed AIDS-afflicted families and

320 pages

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.

The Oil Road A Journey to the Heart of the Oil Economy

James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello Opening 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, July 2012

new arms races and displaced local communities. A compelling travelogue, The Oil

256 pages

Road explores the hidden history of an iconic project that is also a metaphor for our

Taiwan: Faces Publications

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

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

MATT KENNARD Since 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 neoNazis, 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

April 2012 208 pages

has written for Salon, the Chicago Tribune and the Guardian.

The Fall of Muammar Gaddafi NATO’s War in Libya

HUGH ROBERTS The 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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March 2013 160 pages

memoir

Searing, frank memoir of childhood in the German concentration camps

Boy 30529 A 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 April 2013 192 pages

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.

“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

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memoir

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

The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust Notes from an Israeli Life

NOAM CHAYUT Translated 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

June 2013 288 pages

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

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N/A: Hebrew, German, Japanese, Palestinian

memoir

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

Soldier Box Why 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.

June 2013 320 pages

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.

“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

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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.

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

The Frontman Bono (In the Name of Power)

Harry Browne Celebrity 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.

May 2013 176 pages

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.

“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

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philosophy

Capitalism’s colonization of every hour in the day

24/7 Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

JONATHAN CRARY 24/7 explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding, nonstop 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

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philosophy

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

Agonistics Thinking the World Politically

CHANTAL MOUFFE Political conflict in our society is inevitable, and the results are often far from negative. How then should we deal with the intractable differences arising from complex modern culture?

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

July 2013

Radical Democracy, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, and, coauthored with

224 pages

Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

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

19

philosophy

A provocative intellectual assault on the Subalternists’ foundational work

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capitalism VIVEK CHIBBER For 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 February 2013

Pandey and others, Chibber examines whether they offer a plausible

256 pages

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.

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

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philosophy

THE M A PPING S E RIE S NEW EDITION

Mapping the Nation Edited by GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN Introduced by BENEDICT ANDERSON In 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.

November 2012 336 pages Turkey: Everest

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.

N ew E dition

Mapping Ideology Edited by SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK For 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

N ew E dition

Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial

Brazil: Nova Frontiera China: Nanjing UP Germany: Laika Japan: Seidosha Turkey: Dipnot

Edited by VINAYAK CHATURVEDI

November 2012 384 pages

Inspired 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.

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philosophy

Slavoj Žižek’s masterwork on the Hegelian legacy

Less Than Nothing Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

Slavoj ŽiŽek • Major (and massive) philosophical statement from the acclaimed thinker 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 April 2012 1,200 pages

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

Brazil: Boltempo China: Nanjing UP Germany: N/A Italy: Ponte alle Grazie Japan: Koshisha Korea: Saemulgyul Spain & Latin America: Akal Turkey: Encore

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.

“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

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philosophy

Also available by Slavoj Žižek NEW IN PAPERBACK

Living in the End Times Žižek 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 EDITION

The Sublime Object of Ideology Žižek’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: Megazim Za 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

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

2009 • 528 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

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 EDITION

NEW EDITION

The Absent Centre of Political Ontology

Žižek’s take on the relations between fantasy and ideology, and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images surrounding us.

Žižek unearths the core of the Cartesian subject to find the indispensable reference point for any genuinely emancipatory project.

2008 • 272 pages

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

Žižek on Lenin: The 1917 Writings

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;

The Plague of Fantasies

The Ticklish Subject

Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?

2008 • 208 pages

Adrenaline-fueled manifesto for universal values by “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.”

2009 • 168 pages

NEW EDITION

Žižek argues that the subversive core of the Christian legacy forms the foundation of a politics of universal emancipation.

In Defense of Lost Causes

From the tragedy of 9/11 to the even more terrifying farce of the financial meltdown — plus a defense of Badiou’s communist hypothesis.

NEW EDITION

The Fragile Absolute

NEW IN PAPERBACK

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

NEW EDITION

Revolution at the Gates

Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism Four Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion

Žižek 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.”

Žižek looks at totalitarianism in a way that Wittgenstein would approve of— finding it a cobweb of family resemblances.

2011 • 288 pages

2011 • 352 pages Brazil: Boitempo; France: Aden; Germany: Suhrkamp; Italy: Feltrinelli; Korea: Gyoyangin; Spain & Latin America: Debate

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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

philosophy

Radical Thinkers

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 inches Infinitely Demanding: ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-392-6

Set 4to the Desert of the Real Welcome

Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance

Slavoj Žižek 160 pages

Radical Thinkers

Simon Critchley

Radical Thinkers

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

Theodor Adorno In Search of Wagner

Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism

Radical Thinkers

Radical Thinkers

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

Louis Althusser & Étienne Balibar Reading Capital

Jean Baudrillard The Transparency of Evil

Essays on Extreme Phenomena Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan

Walter Benjamin The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Alenka Zupančič

Ernesto Laclau

288 pages

208 pages

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

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

160 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-344-5

340 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-347-6

Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity

Essays on Derrida, Levinas & Contemporary French Thought Simon Critchley Radical Thinkers

200 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-345-2

Walter Benjamin

Radical Thinkers

Radical Thinkers

Simon Critchley Ethics —

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

Terry Eagleton Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism

Guy Debord

The Cultural Turn

The Democratic Paradox

Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 Fredric Jameson

448 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

Argentina: Manantial; Brazil: Record; China: China Social Science Politics Press; Israel: Resling; Japan: — Subjectivity Sakuhinsha; Korea: Hyunsil; Lithuania: Lithuanian Writers’ Essays on Derrida, Levinas, & Contemporary Union; Slovenia: Studia Humanitatis; Spain: Peninsula; French Thought Turkey: Dost Kitabevi

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

Brecht and Method

128 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-349-0

Fredric Jameson

Hal Foster 192 pages

Fredric Jameson The Cultural Tu urn Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998

Chantal Mouffe

128 pages

Design and Crime

Radical Thinkers

204 pages Panegyric

240 pages

256 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-348-3

Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism Terry Eagleton

Radical Thinkers

Radical Thinkers

280 pages

Radical Thinkers

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

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

Georg Lukács Lenin A Study on the Unity of His Thought

Radical Thinkers

Chantal Mouffe The Democratic Paradox

Gillian Rose Hegel Contra Sociology

Paul Virilio War and Cinema The Logistics of Perception

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality

Postmodern Geographies

The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory Edward W. Soja

Contemporary Dialogues on the Left Slavoj Žižek, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler

228 pages

330 pages

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

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

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

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200 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-346-9

Literary Criticism

The formation of an unorthodox literary critic

Distant Reading FRANCO MORETTI How 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,

May 2013 224 pages

Maps, Trees as well as chief editor of The Novel.

Italy: n/a

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literary criticism

On the problems of translation in literary study

Against World Literature On the Politics of Untranslatability

EMILY APTER The 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, March 2013

free versus privatized authorial property, and the poetics of translational

240 pages

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.

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

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Literary criticism

Available by Fredric Jameson 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

Representing Capital

The Hegel Variations

A Reading of Volume One

On the Phenomenology of Spirit

Jameson 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 pages

An epic of joyful and explosive insurrection from the poet of youth rebellion.

2011 • 136 pages China: China Renmin UP; Germany: Verlag Turia & Kant; Japan: Seidosha; Korea: Ghil; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Turkey: Ithaki

China: 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 Modernist Papers

NEW IN PAPERBACK

Valences of the Dialectic

A 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.

Fredric 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 pages

2007 • 426 pages

China: China Social Science Press; Germany: Laika; Korea: Ghil; Latin America: Eterna Cadencia; Turkey: Ithaki

China: China Remnin University Press; France: Beaux-Arts de Paris; India & South Asia: ABS

New edition

New edition

Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist

Updated 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.

Ideologies of Theory

Fables of Aggression

“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-politicalpsychoanalytic theory of criticism.”

Edward Said

2008 • 680 pages Italy: Galaad; Spain & Latin America: Eterna Cadencia; Turkey: Monokl

2008 • 190 pages

A Singular Modernity

Archaeologies of the Future

Essay on the Ontology of the Present

The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions

“Jameson is, as always … entrancing, never short of illuminating juxtapositions or entertaining insights.”

Radical Philosophy

“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 Books

2002 • 250 pages Brazil: Record; Greece: Alexandreia; Italy: Rcs/Sansoni; Japan: Kobushi Shobo; Korea: Munhakdongne; Spain & Latin America: Gedisa; Turkey: Epos

2007 • 431 pages China: 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

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History

Who—and what—are the Bourgeois?

The Bourgeois Between 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” May 2013 224 pages

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

Italy: n/a

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.

“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 hellbent 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

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history

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

NEW IN PAPERBACK

The Revenge of History The Battle for the Twenty-First Century

SEUMAS MILNE The 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

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history

The Making of Global Capitalism LEO PANITCH and SAM GINDIN Panitch 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 September 2012 368 pages

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.

The Poorer Nations A Possible History of the Global South

VIJAY PRASHAD In 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.

January 2013

A true global history, The Poorer Nations is informed by interviews with leading

304 pages

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

VERSO WORLD HIS TORY S E RIE S Perry 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.

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism The 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.

March 2013 304 pages China: Shanghai People’s Publishing Germany: Suhrkamp Latin America: Siglo XXI Sweden: Arkiv

Lineages of the Absolutist State The 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.

March 2013 576 pages China: Shanghai People’s Publishing Spain and Latin America: Siglo XXI Sweden: Arkiv

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art

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

Anywhere or Not at All The Philosophy of Contemporary Art

PETER OSBORNE Contemporary 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 June 2013 256 pages

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.

32

art

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

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

MICHAEL DEMSON Illustrated 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.

33

July 2013 128 pages

art

The Spectacle of Disintegration Situationist Passages Out of the Twenty-First Century

McKENZIE WARK • Wonderful graphic fold-out cover by acclaimed artist Kevin Pyle 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 March 2013

pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice-Becker Ho’s account of the anonymous

224 pages

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.

Derek Bailey And 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 recordsession 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 July 2013 480 pages Japan: Kousakusha

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

34

art

The Art-Architecture Complex HAL FOSTER Hal 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 “artarchitecture 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.

September 2011 224 pages Brazil: COSAC Naify China: Shandong Pictorial France: Les Prairies Ordinaires Israel: Pitom Italy: Postmedia Japan: Kajima Institute Korea: Hyunmum Spain & Latin America: Turner Turkey: Iletisim

Artificial Hells Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

CLAIRE BISHOP For 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.

35

July 2012 368 pages 100 color illustrations Slovenia: Maska Ljubljana

Backlist Highlights BENEDICT ANDERSON

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

IMAGINED COMMUNITIES Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New edition 2006)

THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY (1998)

Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson’s brilliant book on

Trenchant and panoramic, The Origins of Postmodernity traces

nationalism, forged a new field of study when it first appeared in

the genesis, consolidation and consequences of the notion of

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

the postmodern.

this greatly anticipated revised edition, Anderson updates and

Brazil: Zahar; China: China Social Sciences Press; France: Les

elaborates on the core question: what makes people live, die and

Prairies Ordinaires; Japan: Kobushi Shobo; Korea: Hyunsil

kill in the name of nations?

Culture Studies; Portugal: Edicioes 70; Romania: Idea Design

Audio, English: Tantor Arabic: Cadmus; Brazil: Companhia

and Print Spain: Anagrama; Sweden: Daidalos; Taiwan: Linking; Turkey: Iletisim

das Letras; Catalan: Afers; China: Shanghai People’s Publishing; Czech Republic: Karolinum; Denmark: Roskilde; Finland: Vastapaino; France: La Découverte; Georgia: Language and

GIOVANNI ARRIGHI

Culture; Germany: Campus Verlag; Greece: Nefeli; Hungary: L’Harmattan; Israel: The Open University of Israel; Japan:

THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY

Shosekikobo Hayama; Khmer: Centre for Khmer Studies

Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (New edition 2010)

Korea: Ghil; Mexico: Fondo Cultura Economica; Netherlands: Jan Mets; Norway: Spartacus; Philippines: Anvil; Portugal: 70 lda; Romania: Art; Russia: Kanon; Serbia: Skolska Knija;

The Long Twentieth Century traces the epochal shifts in the

Slovenia: Humanitas; Spain: Fondo de Cultura Economica;

relationship between capital accumulation and state formation

Sweden: Daidalos; Taiwan: China Times Publishing; Turkey:

over a 700-year period. Now a classic of history and sociology,

Metis; Ukraine: Krytyka

the book is fully updated in the light of recent events.

Brazil: Contraponto; China: Jiangsu; Hong Kong: OUP; Italy:

UNDER THREE FLAGS

Il Saggiatore; Japan: Sakuhinsha; Korea: Greenbee; Russia:

Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (2007)

& Latin America: Akal; Sweden: Daidalos; Turkey: Imge

Territory of the Future Fund; Slovenia: Založba Sophia; Spain Kitabevi Yayinlari

Benedict Anderson continues the historical and theoretical project begun in Imagined Communities, by providing a

ADAM SMITH IN BEIJING

compelling exploration of fin-de-siècle politics and culture that spans the Caribbean, Imperial Europe and the South China Sea.

Lineages of the 21st Century (2009)

He depicts the dense intertwining of radical internationalism

In the late eighteenth century, the political economist Adam

and anti-colonial nationalism, a process that gave birth to the

Smith predicted an eventual equalization of power between the

politics of early anti-globalization.

conquering West and the conquered non-West. Demonstrating

Brazil: Unicamp; France: La Découverte; Italy: Manifesto

Smith’s

Libri; Indonesia: Marjin Kiri; Japan: NTT; Korea: Ghil;

extraordinary rise, Arrighi examines the events that have brought

Philippines: Anvil; Slovenia: Založba Sophia; Spain: Akal;

it about, and the increasing dependence of US wealth and power

Turkey: Metis

on Chinese imports and purchases of US Treasury bonds.

continued

relevance

to

understanding

China’s

Brazil: Boitempo; China: SSAP; France: Max Milo; Germany:

PERRY ANDERSON

VSA; Italy: Feltrinelli; Japan: Sakuhinsha; Korea: Ghil;

The New Old World

School of Economics Publishing House; Spain & Latin

Poland: Krytyki Politycznej; Russia: State University Higher America: Akal; Turkey: Yordam

(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;

36

Backlist Highlights ALAIN BADIOU

Italy: Fandango; Japan: Chikuma Shobo; Korea: Ghil; Poland:

FIVE LESSONS ON WAGNER

TankeKraft; Turkey: Yapi Kredi; Vietnam: Hoasen University

Ksiazka I Prasa; Spain & Latin America: Paidós; Sweden:

(2010)

PRECARIOUS LIFE

With an Afterword by Slavoj ŽIŽEK Translated by Susan Spitzer

The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2006)

In this major new work, Alain Badiou, radical philosopher

In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith

and keen Wagner enthusiast, offers a detailed reading of the

Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America

critical responses to the composer’s work, which include

to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for

Adorno’s writings on the composer and Wagner’s recuperation

a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might

by Nazism as well as more recent readings by Philippe LacoueLabarthe and others. Slavoj Žižek provides an afterword, and

instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.

both philosophers make a passionate case for re-examining the

China: Henan; France: Amsterdam; Germany: Suhrkamp;

relevance of Wagner to the contemporary world.

Greece: Nissos; Italy: Postmedia; Japan: Ibunsha; Korea:

China: Henan; France: Nous; Germany: Diaphanes; Italy:

Kyungsung University Press; Spain & Latin America: Paidós; Sweden: Tankekraft; Turkey: Metis

Asterios; Japan: Seidosha; Korea: Book in the Gap; Spain & Latin America: Akal

MIKE DAVIS

WALDEN BELLO

BUDA’S WAGON

The Food Wars

A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2008)

(2009)

In this disturbing history, Mike Davis traces the car bomb’s worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the

The hike in global food prices has pushed hundreds of millions

role of state intelligence agencies—particularly those of the

more people into poverty, and sparked riots and protests in the

United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan—in globalizing urban

Middle East, Africa and the Americas. Walden Bello, the leading

terrorist techniques. Davis argues that the incessant impact of

writer and activist on the global South, provides a penetrating

car bombs is changing cities and urban lifestyle.

analysis of the various causes: not just the rise in energy costs,

France: La Découverte; Germany: Assoziation A; India &

but also the IMF and WTO-led restructuring of the worldwide

South Asia: Seagull; Italy: Einaudi; Japan: Kawade Shobo;

agricultural system. Charting the evolution of the current crisis,

Korea: Strategy & Culture; Poland: Hal!art; Slovenia: Maska;

Bello also offers a way forward: the principle of food sovereignty,

Spain & Latin America: Ediciones de Intervencion Cultural;

allowing the developing world to protect and sustain a diverse

Sweden: Leopard; Turkey: Agora

range of crops.

Arabic: NCT; Brazil: Leopardo; France: Carnets Nord; Germany: Assoziation A; Italy: Nuovi Mondi Media; Japan:

PLANET OF SLUMS

Sakuhinsha; Korea: The Soup Publishing; Poland: Ksiazka i

(2007)

Prasa; Philippines: Anvil; Spain: Virus; Sweden: TankeKraft

In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the

JUDITH BUTLER

future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban

Frames of War

hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from

world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast

When Is Life Grievable? (2010)

humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the

In this urgent response to violence, racism and increasingly

formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal

dominant methods of coercion, Judith Butler explores the

urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen

media’s portrayal of state violence, a process integral to how the

by either classical Marxism or neo-liberal theory.

West engages in war. She calls for a reconceptualization of the

Arabic: NCT Egypt; Brazil: Boitempo; China: Shanghai Sanhui;

Left, one united in opposition and resistance to the illegitimate

Croatia: V.B.Z.; France: La Découverte; Germany: Assoziation

and arbitrary effects of state violence.

A; Indonesia: Lafadl; Italy: Feltrinelli; Japan: Akashi; Korea:

Brazil: Record; Czech Republic: Grimmus; France: La

Dolbegae; Poland: Ksiazka i Prasa; Slovenia: Založba *Cf;

Découverte; Germany: Campus; India & South Asia: Seagull;

Spain & Latin America: Akal; Sweden: Arkiv; Turkey: Metis

37

Backlist Highlights CITY OF QUARTZ

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

Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New edition 2006)

PAUL FEYERABEND

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,

AGAINST METHOD

Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of

(New edition 2010)

Nathaniel West—a city in which we may glimpse our own future

Paul Feyerabend’s acclaimed work, which sparked controversy

mirrored with terrifying clarity.

and continues to fuel fierce debate, shows the deficiencies

Brazil: Boitempo; China: Shanghai People’s Publishing;

of many widespread ideas about the nature of knowledge.

France: La Découverte; Germany: Assoziation A; Italy:

He argues that the only feasible explanation of any scientific

Manifesto Libri; Japan: Seidosha; Spain & Latin America:

success is a historical account, and that anarchism must now

Lengua De Trapo; Sweden: Arkiv

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.

COSTAS DOUZINAS

Brazil: UNESP; Bulgaria: Naonka I Izkuistvo; China: China Times; Croatia: DAF; Czech Republic: Aurora; France: Seuil; Germany: Suhrkamp; Greece: Sychrona Themata; Hungary:

WITH SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK (EDS.)

Atlantisz; Italy: Feltrinelli; Japan: Shinyosha; Netherlands:

THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM

Lemniscaat; Portugal: Relogio; Russia: AST; Serbia: Veselin

(2010)

Turkey: Ayrinti

Maslesa; Slovenia: Humanitas; Spain: Tecnos; Sweden: Arkiv;

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

FAREWELL TO REASON

perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated

(1988)

society, all things should be owned in common.

Farewell to Reason offers a vigorous challenge to the scientific

This volume brings together their discussions on the

rationalism that underlies Western ideals of “progress”

philosophical and political import of the communist idea,

and “development,” whose damaging social and ecological

highlighting both its continuing significance and the need to

consequences are now widely recognized.

reconfigure the concept within a world marked by havoc and

Brazil: UNESP; China: Jiangsu; France: Seuil; Germany:

crisis.

Suhrkamp; Greece: Ipodomi; Hungary: Atlantisz; Italy:

China: China Social Science Press; France: Nouvelles Éditions

Armando; Japan: Hosei; Korea: Hangilsa; Russia: AST; Spain:

Lignes; Germany: Laika; Greece: Nissos; Italy: Derive Approdi;

Critica; Turkey: Ayrinti

Japan: Suiseisha; Korea: Greenbee; Spain & Latin America: Paidós; Sweden: TankeKraft; Turkey: Ayrinti

NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN TERRY EAGLETON

THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY

IDEOLOGY

Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New edition 2003)

An Introduction (New edition 2007)

Thoroughly researched, this is a disturbing and powerful

This accessible introduction unravels the varied meanings

argument indicting with rigor and honesty those who exploit

of ideology, from the Enlightenment to postmodernism, and

the tragedy of the Holocaust for their own personal political

outlines the major strands of Marxist thought, as well as that of

and financial gain. It concludes that the Holocaust Industry has

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and the poststructuralists.

become an outright extortion racket.

Brazil: Boitempo; China: Commercial Press; Germany:

Arabic:

Metzler; Greece: Ypsilon; India & South Asia: ABS; Israel:

Dar

Al-Adab;

Brazil:

Record;

Croatia: Zlatko

Hasanbegovic; Denmark: Host & Son; Estonia: Mati Nigul;

Resling; Italy: Fazi; Japan: Heibonsha; Macedonia: Templum;

France: La Fabrique; Germany: Piper; Greece: Ekdoseis

38

Backlist Highlights to Eikostou Protou; Israel: Resling; Italy: Rizzoli; Japan:

Brazil: Boitempo; China: Shanghai Translation ; France: La

Sankosha; Lithuania: D.K.I; Netherlands: Mets en Schilt;

ville brûle; Germany: VSA; Italy: VoLo; Japan: Sakuhinsha;

Norway: Spartacus; Poland: Oficyna Wydawnicza Volumen;

Korea: Changbi; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Turkey: Metis

Portugal: Antigona; Romania: Antet; Spain & Latin America: Siglo XXI; Sweden: Ordfront; Turkey: Kirmizi

The Limits to Capital (New edition 2007)

Richard Gott

Widely praised as an exciting, insightful exposition and

Britain’s Empire

development of Marx’s critique of political economy, Harvey

Resistance, Repression and Revolt (2011)

updates his classic text with a discussion of the turmoil in

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

“uneven geographical development,” Harvey takes the reader

military operation and maintained as a military dictatorship.

step by step through layers of crisis formation, beginning with

Gott traces the rebellions and resistance of subject peoples

Marx’s controversial argument concerning the falling rate

whose stories are excluded from traditional accounts of empire.

of profit, moving through crises of credit and finance, and

world markets today. In his analyses of “fictitious capital” and

closing with a timely analysis of geo-political and geographical

Latin America: Capital Intelectual

considerations. The Limits to Capital provides one of the best theoretical guides to the contradictory forms found in the

Chris Harman

historical and geographical dynamics of capitalist development.

A People’s History of the World

Turkey: Tan Kitabevi

China: Shanghai Sanhui Culture & Press; Greece: Parisianou;

From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (2008)

ERNESTO LACLAU

“I have had many people ask me if there is a book which does for

ON POPULIST REASON

world history what my book A People’s History of the United States does for this country. I always respond that I know of

(2007)

only one book that accomplishes this extremely difficult task, and that is Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World. It

In this highly original work Ernesto Laclau continues the

is an indispensable volume on my reference bookshelf.” Howard

philosophical and political exploration initiated in Hegemony

Zinn

and Socialist Strategy, focusing on the construction of popular identities and how “the people” emerges as a collective actor.

Arabic: NCT; France: La Découverte; Germany: Laika; Greece:

This book is essential reading for all those interested in the

Motibo; Korea: n/a; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Thailand:

question of political identities in present-day societies.

Kobfai; Turkey: Yordam

China: Jiangsu; France: Seuil; Germany: Laika; Hungary: Noran; Italy: Laterza; Japan: Akashi; Korea: Humanitas;

DAVID HARVEY

Poland: University of Lower Silesia; Romania: CA Publishing; Slovenia: Založba Sophia; Turkey: Epos

A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010)

WITH CHANTAL MOUFFE

The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression has

HEGEMONY AND SOCIALIST STRATEGY

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,

Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New edition 2001)

becoming one of the world’s foremost Marx scholars. Based on his recent lectures, this current volume aims to bring that depth

This key text of the new “post-Marxism” criticizes the persistent

of learning to a broader audience, guiding first-time readers

essentialism of the Marxist tradition from Plekhanov via Lenin

through a fascinating and deeply rewarding text. A Companion

and Gramsci to Althusser, and proposes a radical renovation of

to Marx’s Capital offers fresh, original and sometimes critical interpretations of a book that changed the course of history

theory and practice.

and, as Harvey intimates, may do so again.

Argentina: Fondo de Cultura Economica; China: Hei

39

Backlist Highlights Longjiong; France: Les Solitaires Intempestifs; Germany:

this unrivalled compendium brings many of them together.

Passagen; Israel: Reisling; Italy: Il Nuovo Melangolo; Japan:

This anthology, global in scope, presents the voices of dissent

Chikuma Shobo; Korea: Humanitas; Poland: University

through the ages: poems and songs, pamphlets and speeches,

of Lower Silesia Press; Serbia: Stvarnost; Spain: Siglo XXI;

plays and manifestos. The Verso Book of Dissent will become an

Sweden: Vertigo; Taiwan: Yuan-Liou, Turkey: Birikim

invaluable tool, reminding today’s citizens that these traditions will never die.

Greece: Enalios // Oceanos; Italy: Fandango; Korea: Sam &

TIMOTHY MITCHELL

Parkers; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Thailand: Kobfai

Carbon Democracy Political Power in the Age of Oil

ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD

Timothy Mitchell rethinks the history of energy, the politics of

EMPIRE OF CAPITAL

nature, the work of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world. He begins with the history of coal, which

(2005)

gave those who produced it the power to shut down energy

This book brings into sharp relief the nature of today’s new

systems, a power they used to build the first mass democracies.

capitalist empire, in which the political reach of imperial power

Oil offered the West an alternative source of energy, and a

cannot match its economic hegemony. The global economy is

different form of politics. It helped create a denatured political

administered, not by a global state, but by a system of multiple

life whose central object, the economy, appeared capable

local states, policed by the most disproportionately powerful

of infinite growth. It created democratic forces dependent

military force the world has ever known and enforced according

on an undemocratic Middle East. And it left us with an

to a new military doctrine of war without end in purpose or

impoverished political practice, incapable of addressing the

time.

crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the

Brazil: Boitempo; China: Shanghai Trans. Co.; Finland:

disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fueled collapse

Vastapaino; France: Lux; Germany: Laika; Greece: Kapsimi;

of the ecological order.

Italy: Meltemi; Japan: Kinokuniya; Korea: Sang Hyoung Mun

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

Ja; Spain: Ediciones de Intervencion Cultural; Turkey: Yordam

GÖRAN THERBORN

THE ORIGIN OF CAPITALISM

FROM MARXISM TO POST-MARXISM?

(New edition 2002)

(2010)

In this revised and updated edition, Ellen Meiksins Wood challenges most existing accounts of capitalism’s origins,

In this pithy and panoramic work—both stimulating for the

arguing that they make its emergence seem natural and

specialist and accessible to the general reader—one of the

inevitable rather than recognizing its distinctive attributes as a

world’s leading social theorists, Göran Therborn, traces the

social system.

trajectory of Marxism in the twentieth century and anticipates

China: China Renmin; Czech Republic: Svoboda; France:

its legacy for radical thought in the twenty-first.

Brazil:

Boitempo;

China:

SSAP;

Hungary:

Lux; Germany: Laika; Korea: Kyungsung; Turkey: Yordam

Eszmélet

Alapitvany; Korea: Ghil; Spain & Latin America: Akal; Turkey: Dipnot

VERSO BOOKS THE VERSO BOOK OF DISSENT From 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

40

Agents and Representatives Federico Campagna Rights Manager 6 Meard Street London W1F 0EG Tel +44 207 437 3546 Fax +44 207 734 0059 federico@verso.co.uk

Japan Tsutomu Yawata The English Agency (Japan) Ltd. Sakuragi Bldg, 4F 6-7-3 Minami Aoyama Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0062 Japan Tel +81 3 3406 5385 Fax +81 3 3406 5387 tsutomu_yawata@eaj.co.jp

Turkey Müge Gürsoy Sökmen Metis Yayinlari Ipek Sokak 5 34433 Beyoğlu Istanbul Turkey Tel +90 212 2454696 Fax +90 212 2454519 mugesokmen@metiskitap.com

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