Verso: 737 books

London at night has always been seen as a lawless orgy of depravity and pestilence. But is it now as bland and unthreatening as any new town? Sukhdev Sandhu journeys across the city to find out whether the London night really has been rendered neutral by street lighting and CCTV cameras. His nocturnal...

Re-launch of the Collected Works of the legendary revolutionary in paperback Among the most influential political and social forces of the twentieth century, modern communism rests firmly on philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings developed by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known...

Three radical perspectives on the critique of capitalism For years, the critique of capitalism was lost from public discourse; the very word “capitalism” sounded like a throwback to another era. Nothing could be further from the truth today. In this new intellectual atmosphere, Sociology,...

An important contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century Marxism During the first decades of the twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg was the leader of the workers’ movement in Poland and Germany. She made a remarkable contribution to socialist theory and practice, yet her legacy...

History is forged through the travel of ideas across continents—as well as by bombs. The Age of Globalization is an account of the unlikely connections that made up late nineteenth-century politics and culture, and in particular between militant anarchists in Europe and the Americas, and anti-imperialist...

In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other. Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires,...

It's not capitalism, it's not neoliberalism - what if it's something worse? In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capitalists and their factories...

Tracking the postconceptual dimensions of contemporary art If, as Walter Benjamin claimed, “it is the function of artistic form … to make historical content into a philosophical truth” then it is the function of criticism to recover and to complete that truth. Contemporary art makes this...

A bravura exploration of politics and writing in dark times In The Last Resistance, Jacqueline Rose explores the power of writing to create and transform our political lives. In particular, she examines the role of literature in the Zionist imagination: here, literature is presented as a unique...

For many illusions, it is easy to find owners – people who proudly declare that they believe in things such as life after death, human reason, and self-regulation of financial markets. Yet there are also different kinds of illusions at work, for example, in art: trompe l’oeil-painting pleases...

A bold new vision of the modern English novel The leading critic Francis Mulhern uncovers a hidden history in the fiction of the past century, identifying a central new genre: the condition of culture novel. Reading across and against the grain of received patterns of literary association,...

Freudianism is a major icon in the history of ideas, independently rich and suggestive today both for psychoanalysis and for theories of language. It offers critical insights whose recognition demands a change in the manner in which the fundamental principles of both psychoanalysis and linguistic...

The Melancholy Science is the first and foundational work from the celebrated philosopher Gillian Rose and a classic critique of critical theory.

For Marc Augé, best-selling author of Non-Places, the prevailing idea of “the Future” rests on our present fears of the contemporary world. It is to the future that we look for redemption and progress; but it is also where we project our personal and apocalyptic anxieties. By questioning notions...