Books in the Radical Thinkers series

One of America's leading feminist voices examines the world of violence and terror, and asks why some lives are more valued than others. Through five essays, this book responds to various US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for an understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.

A reflection on everyday existence in the ‘sphere of consumption of late Capitalism’, this work is Adorno’s literary and philosophical masterpiece. Built from aphorisms and reflections, he shifts in register from personal experience to the most general theoretical problems.

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.

A tour de force of the materialist semiotics of the early Baudrillard

A comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century.

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.

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.

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

A text of the philosophical movement of critical realism.

Offers a source of literary modernism in the twentieth century.

"Once again, Lynne Segal cuts through feminist ambivalence about sex with great intelligence, verve, and courage. "Straight Sex" is not only a masterful analysis of sexuality and gender, but a stunning manifesto of sexual liberation."--Barbara Ehrenreich

The famous postmodernist thinker turns detective to investigate the murder of reality.

Influential exploration of the idea of friendship and its political consequences

Charts the history of women's liberation and calls for a revitalized feminism

Acclaimed French philosopher on metaphysics and politics.

French philosopher with his groundbreaking study of Machiaveilli.

Gives politics the following meaning: the organization of dissent.

Jacqueline Rose argues for the importance of sexual difference and fantasy as key concepts through which an interrogation of contemporary theory should be sustained.

Features the text in the great controversies over literature and art between thinkers who have become giants of 20th-century philosophy.