Bøger i Radical Thinkers serien

In this vehement defence of democracy, Jacques Ranciere explodes the complacency of Western politicians who pride themselves as the defenders of political freedom. As America and its allies use their military might in the misguided attempt to export a desiccated version democracy, and reactionary strands in mainstream political opinion abandon civil liberties, Ranciere argues that true democracygovernment by allis held in profound contempt by the new ruling class. In a compelling and timely analysis, Hatred of Democracy rethinks the subversive power of the democratic ideal.

Classic introduction to Kant's philosophy.

The clearest, boldest and most systematic statement of Simon Critchley's influential views on philosophy, ethics, and politics, Infinitely Demanding identifies a massive political disappointment at the heart of liberal democracy. Arguing that what is called for is an ethics of commitment that can inform a radical politics, Critchley considers the possibility of political subjectivity and action after Marx and Marxism, taking in the work of Kant, Levinas, Badiou and Lacan. Infinitely Demanding culminates in an argument for anarchism as an ethical practice and a remotivating means of political organization.

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.

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.

A suggestive analysis of military 'ways of seeing'. It reveals the convergence of perception and destruction in the parallel technologies of warfare and cinema.

Stinging revolutionary critique of contemporary society.

These essays, written between 1949 and 1967, focus on a single theme: the triumph in the twentieth century of the state-bureaucratic apparatus and ';instrumental reason' and the concomitant liquidation of the individual and the basic social institutions and relationships associated with the individual.

';Watching the president's Christmas message produces this necropolar, white-mass sensation. Seeing the video broadcast of the Christmas service in the cathedral itself, with these pathetic screens and the young worshippers slumped around them here and there, you tell yourself that God and religion deserved better. Deserved to die, yes, but not this. However, watching the presidential figure and his sonorous inanity, you tell yourself that here at least you got what you deserved. Chirac is useless that goes without saying but so are we all ... Uselessness of this kind has no origin: it exists immediately, reciprocally; like a shared secret, you savour it implicitly with its warm bitterness particularly in these cold snaps, as the very essence of the social bond. Sanctioned by that other interactive uselessness the uselessness of the screen.'World-renowned for his lively and often iconoclastic reading of contemporary culture and thought, Jean Baudrillard here turns his hand to topical political debates and issues. In this stimulating collection of journalistic essays Baudrillard addresses subjects ranging from those already established as his trademark (virtual reality, Disney, television) to more unusual topics such as the Western intervention in Bosnia, children's rights, Holocaust revisionism, AIDS, the Rushdie fatwa, Formula One racing, mad cow disease, genetic cloning, and the uselessness of Chirac. These are coruscating and intriguing articles, not least because they show that Baudrillard is pace his critics still susceptible and alert to influences from social movements and the world beyond the hyperreal.

The republication of Suzanne de Brunhoff's classic investigation into Karl Marx's conception of ';the money commodity' shines light on commodities and their fetishism. The investigation of money as the crystallization of value in its material sense is central to how we understand capitalism and how it can be abolished. Marx on Money is an elegant analysis of how money, credit, debt and value fit into the ';logic of capital' that characterizes commodity society.

In Frames of War, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of state violence, a process integral to the way in which the West wages modern war. This portrayal has saturated our understanding of human life, and has led to the exploitation and abandonment of whole peoples, who are cast as existential threats rather than as living populations in need of protection. These people are framed as already lost, to imprisonment, unemployment and starvation, and can easily be dismissed. In the twisted logic that rationalizes their deaths, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of ‘the living.’ This disparity, Butler argues, has profound implications for why and when we feel horror, outrage, guilt, loss and righteous indifference, both in the context of war and, increasingly, everyday life.This book discerns the resistance to the frames of war in the context of the images from Abu Ghraib, the poetry from Guantanamo, recent European policy on immigration and Islam, and debates on normativity and non-violence. In this urgent response to ever more dominant methods of coercion, violence and racism, Butler calls for a re-conceptualization of the Left, one that brokers cultural difference and cultivates resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of state violence and its vicissitudes.

Part of "Radical Thinkers" series, this work presents key texts by philosophers and thinkers. It offers a postmodernist philosopher's tour-de-force contemplation on sex, technology, politics and disease in Western culture after the 'orgy' of the 1960s.

Part of "Radical Thinkers" series, this work presents key texts by philosophers and thinkers. It offers an account of Leninism.

Despite much talk of its decline, the nuclear family persists as a structure central to contemporary society, a fact to be lamented, according to the ideas of Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh. The Anti-social Family dissects the network of household, kinship and sexual relations that constitute the family form in advanced capitalist societies to show how they reinforce conditions of inequality. This classic work explores the personal and social needs that the family promises to meet but more often denies, and proposes moral and political practices for more egalitarian caring alternatives.

This text offers readers 12 entry points into Baudrillard's thought by way of the concepts he uses throughout his oeuvre: the object, seduction, value, impossible exchange, the obscene, the virtual, symbolic exchange, the transparency of evil, the perfect crime, destiny, duality and thought.

With race and the police once more burning issues, this classic work from one of America's giants of black radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power

Essays on Judaism in the modern world, from philosophy and history to art and politicsIn these essays Deutscher speaks of the emotional heritage of the European Jew with a calm clear-sightedness. As a historian he writes without religious belief, but with a generous breadth of understanding; as a philosopher he writes of some of the great Jews of Europe: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Freud. He explores the Jewish imagination through the painter Chagall. He writes of the Jews under Stalin and of the ';remnants of a race'; after Hitler, as well as of the Zionist ideal, of the establishment of the state of Israel, of the Six-Day War, and of the perils ahead.

Classic study of Jewish libertarian thought, from Walter Benjamin to Franz KafkaTowards the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Central Europe a generation of Jewish intellectuals whose work was to transform modern culture. Drawing at once on the traditions of German Romanticism and Jewish messianism, their thought was organized around the cabalistic idea of the ';tikkoun': redemption. Redemption and Utopia uses the concept of ';elective affinity' to explain the surprising community of spirit that existed between redemptive messianic religious thought and the wide variety of radical secular utopian beliefs held by this important group of intellectuals. The author outlines the circumstances that produced this unusual combination of religious and non-religious thought and illuminates the common assumptions that united such seemingly disparate figures as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukcs.

A reinterpretation of thinkers from Benjamin and Rosenzweig to Simone Weil and DerridaJudaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays challenges the philosophical presentation of Judaism as the sublime ';other' of modernity. Here, Gillian Rose develops a philosophical alternative to deconstruction and post-modernism by critically re-engaging the social and political issues at stake in every reconstruction.

Caudwell's controversial book offers an astute and enduring diagnosis of the maladies of bourgeois epistemology

Set 16 of Verso's Radical Thinkers series.On the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth, four titles that consider the life and works of Karl Marx.

First published: Boston: Alyson Publications, A1980.

Originally published by Allison and Busby Limited, 1980.

A classic philosophical study on how political and cultural ideas come to dominate.

An original and powerful statement which enables us to close the widening gap between liberal democracy and the events of a disordered world.

Key study in the use of psychoanalysis for literary criticism.

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.

The Ego and His Own, the seminal defence of individualism, coloured the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Ernst, Henrik Ibsen and Victor Serge, among many others, some of whom would vigorously deny any such influence in later years. Less reticent was Marcel Duchamp, who described Max Stirner as the philosopher most important to his work.Challenging the religious, philosophical and political constraints on personal freedom, Stirner criticizes all doctrines and beliefs that place the interests of God, the state, humanity or society over those of the individual. Anticipating the later work of nihilists, existentialists, and anarchists, The Ego and His Own upholds personal autonomy against all that might oppose it.