Books published by Verso Books

This text rages against the move toward conservative, assimilationist politics promoted by some gay men and lesbians (homocons), embraced by a liberal medial all too eager to erase the progressive roots of the gay liberation movement.

Kathy Acker was one of the original, subversive and influential writers of the late 20th century. This is a collection of essays on Acker's work, including Peter Wollen's primer, and Avital Ronell's meditation on friendship and mourning. It reveals his project, and the ways in which fiction can penetrate the heart of political and cultural life.

A war that has killed over a million Iraqis was a ';humanitarian intervention', the US army is a force for liberation, and the main threat to world peace is posed by Islam.Those are the arguments of a host of liberal commentators, ranging from Christopher Hitchens to Kanan Makiya, Michael Ignatieff, Paul Berman, and Bernard-Henri Levy. In this critical intervention, Richard Seymour unearths the history of liberal justifications for empire, showing how savage policies of conquestincluding genocide and slaveryhave been retailed as charitable missions.From the Cold War to the War on Terror, Seymour argues that the colonial tropes of ';civilization' and ';progress' still shape liberal pro-war discourse, and still conceal the same bloody realities.

For Alain Badiou, theatreunlike cinemais the place for the staging of a truly emancipatory collective subject. In this sense theatre is, of all the arts, the one strictly homologous to politics: both theatre and politics depend on a limited set of texts or statements, collectively enacted by a group of actors or militants, which put a limit on the excessive power of the state. This explains why the history of theatre has always been inseparable from a history of state repression and censorship.This definitive collection includes not only Badious pamphlet Rhapsody for the Theatre but also essays on Jean-Paul Sartre, on the political destiny of contemporary theatre, and on Badious own work as a playwright, as author of the Ahmed Tetralogy.

Marc Perelman pulls no punches in this succinct and searing broadside, assailing the ';recent form of barbarism' that is the global sporting event. Forget the Olympics and consider, under Perelman's guidance, the ledger of inequities maintained by such supposedly harmless games.They have provided a smokescreen for the forcible removal of ';undesirables'; aided governments in the pursuit of racist agendas; affirmed the hypocrisy of drug-testing in an industry where doping is more an imperative than an aberration; and developed the pornographic hybrid that Perelman dubs ';sporn', a further twist in our corrupt obsession with the body.Drawing examples from the modern history of the international sporting event, Perelman argues that today's colosseums, upheld as examples of ';health', have become the steamroller for a decadent age fixated on competition, fame and elitism.

The Conspiracy is the last and most acclaimed novel by French writer and activist Paul Nizan, who died two years after its publication fighting the Germans at the Battle of Dunkirk. Hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre as Nizan's masterpiece, the book centers upon the figure of Bertrand Rosenthal, a misguided philosophy student studying in pre-war Paris. Eager to foment a revolution and having little grasp of his own motives, Rosenthal draws a small group of disciples into a conspiracy both fatuous and deadly. Simultaneously, he plunges into a forbiddenand ultimately tragiclove affair as the intertwined plots move inexorably toward their twin destinations of betrayal and death.The Conspiracy won the coveted Prix Interalli in 1938. This new edition includes Walter Benjamin's critique of the book, available here for the first time in English.

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieys, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on todays politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

Mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece,Argentina, and the United States ultimately share an agendatoraise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalistmovements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatorydemocracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today.Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensiveinterviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela,Argentina, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is anexpansive portrait of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, andorganizational forms championed by the new movements, as wellas an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy fromancient Athens to Zuccotti Park. The new movements put forwardthe idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.

A comprehensive analysis of the philosophy of the dialectic by the doyen of cultural criticism.

This illustrated guide to the changing architecture of London argues that new developments are a deliberate distraction from the city's economic and political problems.

Leading commentators examine the Afghan debacle and its parallels with previous British and Soviet occupations