Bøger udgivet af Verso Books

Reconstructs Los Angeles's shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. This work tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. It gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West.

A field manual to the technologies that are changing our lives at bewildering speed

Pilger tackles the injustices and double standards inherent in the politics of globalization and exposes the terrible truth behind the power and wealth of states and corporations John Pilger is one of the world's renowned investigative journalists and documentary filmmakers. In this classic book, with an updated introduction, he reveals the secrets and illusions of modern imperialism. Beginning with Indonesia, he shows how General Suharto's bloody seizure of power in the 1960s was part of a western design to impose a ';global economy' on Asia. A million Indonesians died as the price for being the World Bank's ';model pupil.' In a shocking chapter on Iraq, he delineates the true nature of the West's war against the people of that country. And he dissects, piece by piece, the propaganda of the ';war on terror' to expose its Orwellian truth. Finally, he looks behind the picture-postcard image of his homeland, Australia, to illuminate an enduring legacy of imperialism: the subjugation of the First Australians. Now with a new introduction, this remains one of the most shocking investigations of contemporary power.

An extraordinary memoir of transition and transgender politics and culture';Six weeks before sex reassignment surgery (SRS), I am obliged to stop taking my hormones. I suddenly feel very differently about my forthcoming operation.' In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgerya process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialised national newspaper column. Trans tells of her life to the present moment: a story of growing up, of defining yourself, and of the rapidly changing world of gender politics. Fresh from university, eager to escape a dead-end job, she launches a career as a writer in a publishing culture dominated by London cliques and still figuring out the impact of the Internet. She navigates the treacherous waters of a world where, even in the liberal and feminist media, transgender identities go unacknowledged, misunderstood or worse. Yet through art, film, music, politics and football, Jacques starts to become the person she had only imagined, and begins the process of transition. Interweaving the personal with the political, her memoir is a powerful exploration of debates that comprise trans politics, issues which promise to redefine our understanding of what it means to be alive. Revealing, honest, humorous, and self-deprecating, Trans includes an epilogue with Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?, in which Jacques and Heti discuss the cruxes of writing and identity.

Written in the white heat of revolutionary Russia's Civil War, Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism is one of the most potent defenses of revolutionary dictatorship. In his provocative commentary to this new edition the philosopher Slavoj AA iAA ek argues that Trotsky's attack on the illusions of liberal democracy has a vital relevance today.

A classic of twentieth-century thought, charting how reason regressed back into myth and superstition

Bestselling, magisterial melding of global environmental history and global political history

A classic work of Marxist analysis, available unabridged for the first timeOriginally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, maintained that Marx's project could only be revived if its scientific and revolutionary novelty was thoroughly divested of all traces of humanism, idealism, Hegelianism and historicism. In order to complete this critical rereading, Althusser and his students at the cole normale superieure ran a seminar on Capital, re-examining its arguments, strengths and weaknesses in detail, and it was out of those discussions that this book was born. Previously only available in English in highly abridged form, this edition, appearing fifty years after its original publication in France, restores chapters by Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Ranciere. It includes a major new introduction by tienne Balibar.

An impassioned manifesto from the author of Booker-winner God of Small Things, one of the most vocal campaigners in the world

Coates is the essential chronicler of black America, and his first memoir is a small and beautiful epic of growing up in 1980s Baltimore

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and those of Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern disciplinespsychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these modes of thinking only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede history to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical processes and generative principles. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that is ';literate in desire,' and capable of interpreting what is unsaid in the manifold operations of culture.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleepexplores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life.Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-time blurs any separation between an intensified, ubiquitous consumerism and emerging strategies of control and surveillance. He describes the ongoing management of individual attentiveness and the impairment of perception within the compulsory routines of contemporary technological culture. At the same time, he shows that human sleep, as a restorative withdrawal that is intrinsically incompatible with 24/7 capitalism, points to other more formidable and collective refusals of world-destroying patterns of growth and accumulation.

For Marc Auge, 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 of certainty, truth, and totality, Auge finds ways to separate the future from our eternal, terrified present and liberates the mind to allow it to conceptualize our possible futures afresh.

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 its observers with ';anonymous illusions' illusions where it is not entirely clear who exactly it is that should be deceived.Anonymous illusions offer a universal pleasure principle within culture: they are present in games, sport, design, eroticism, manners, charm, beauty, etc. However it seems that this pleasure principle is increasingly subjected to misrecognition: the proud proprietors of certain illusions are no longer capable of recognizing that they too follow anonymous illusions. As a consequence, they mistake happy, polite others for nave idiots or ';savages' as owners of stupid illusions; and consider their happiness an obscene intrusion as something in which they could never share.Pfaller explores the strange properties of these shared illusions, and finds that they have a central and crucial role in our cultureand we need to better understand them in order to protect the public sphere.

In this hugely influential book, Laclau and Mouffe examine the workings of hegemony and contemporary social struggles, and their significance for democratic theory. With the emergence of new social and political identities, and the frequent attacks on Left theory for its essentialist underpinnings, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy remains as relevant as ever, positing a much-needed antidote against ';Third Way' attempts to overcome the antagonism between Left and Right.

Liberals and conservatives proclaim the end of the American holiday from history. Now the easy games are over; one should take sides. iek argues this is precisely the temptation to be resisted. In such moments of apparently clear choices, the real alternatives are most hidden. Welcome to the Desert of the Real steps back, complicating the choices imposed on us. It proposes that global capitalism is fundamentalist and that America was complicit in the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. It points to our dreaming about the catastrophe in numerous disaster movies before it happened, and explores the irony that the tragedy has been used to legitimize torture. Last but not least it analyzes the fiasco of the predominant leftist response to the events.

"The Communist Manifesto", drafted on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, is a political text of literary interest and historical insight. It is presented here by Eric Hobsbawm who describes the century-and-a-half of history which has been both shaped and illuminated by the "Manifesto".

A searing critique of participatory art by an iconoclastic historian.

Master philosopher and cultural theorist tackles the founder of modern dialecticsIn this major new study, the philosopher and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson offers a new reading of Hegel's foundational text Phenomenology of Spirit.In contrast to those who see the Phenomenology as a closed system ending with Absolute Spirit, Jameson's reading presents an open work in which Hegel has not yet reconstituted himself in terms of a systematic philosophy (Hegelianism) and in which the moments of the dialectic and its levels have not yet been formalized. Hegel's text executes a dazzling variety of changes on conceptual relationships, in terms with are never allowed to freeze over and become reified in purely philosophical named concepts. The ending, on the aftermath of the French Revolution, is interpreted by Jameson, contra Fukuyama's ';end of history,' as a provisional stalemate between the political and the social, which is here extrapolated to our own time.

Three renowned contemporary theorists discuss their different perspectives for politics and thought.

A radical interpretation of the divisions leading up to the declaration of war, August, 1914.

Capitalism is going to endPeter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this post-capitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism, socialism and exterminism might actually entail.Could the current rise of real-life robocops usher in a world that resembles Ender's Game? And sure, communism will bring an end to material scarcities and inequalities of wealthbut there's no guarantee that social hierarchies, governed by an economy of ';likes,' wouldn't rise to take their place. A whirlwind tour through science fiction, social theory and the new technologies already shaping our lives, Four Futures is a balance sheet of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.

Offering a kaleidoscopic journey into the experiences of modernization, the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world, this title dexterously interweaves an exploration of modernism in art, literature, and architecture.

Contemporary philosophy of science has paid close attention to the understanding of scientific practice, in contrast to the previous focus on scientific method. This work shows the deficiencies of many widespread ideas about the nature of knowledge. It argues that the only feasible explanation of any scientific success is a historical account.

Examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in Los Angeles, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb. This book explores the evolution of the Latino majority, and how the Pacific economy is changing the structure of urban life.

Criticizes the brutality of Israeli occupation, the venality and corruption of the regimes in the region, and the suffering of the Palestinian people. This book presents the work of Naji al-Ali grew, one of the Arab world's greatest cartoonists, revered in the region for his outspokenness, honesty and humanity.

A text of the philosophical movement of critical realism.