Verso

Landscapes showcases the development and practice of John Berger's unique way of seeing. Here he surveys the aesthetic landscapes that have informed, challenged and nourished his understanding of the world. Berger pays homage to the writers and thinkers who influenced him, such as Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bertolt Brecht. His expansive perspective embraces artistic movements and individual artists - from the Renaissance to the present - while never neglecting the social and political context of their creation.

The Moment of Cubism is one of John Berger's most important collections of art criticism. Whether considering Vermeer in his studio, Poussin's poignant meditation on death, or the complexities of Rodin's sculpture, Berger draws together the threads that bind individual artists to their social and political context. Here Berger argues that Cubism was a moment rather than a movement, one that came and went without the consent of its key figures - Picasso and Braque above all. He makes a case for Cubism's revolutionary influence. As always, Berger helps us see the world in new ways.

A handbook for how to organize to meet immediate needs in your community and work toward lasting change. Around the world, people are faced with crisis after crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to or actively engineer each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support vulnerable members of their communities. This survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid has been a part of all larger, powerful social movements, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Mutual aid isn't charity: it's a form of organizing where people get to create new systems of care and generosity so we can survive.

Architecture, as we know it, is in crisis. The authority of architects is crumbling, their methods no longer tenable. In a highly critical introspection, architect and writer Reinier de Graaf explores the tough choices ahead and the course of action that must follow. Architecture Against Architecture demands we rethink both how and why we build. With wit and insight, De Graaf lays out the future of the profession, challenging readers to question the fundamental assumptions of the discipline. How do we end the feudal veneration of starchitects? When will architects finally recognize that it is in their own best interest to unionize? Why aren't more practices collectively owned? Why do so many architects over sixty-seven refuse to retire? How do we stop buildings from being copy-righted? What will remain of architecture after AI? What can prevent iconic structures from being embroiled in money laundering? And the vital question: What projects should architects refuse on moral grounds?

Freedom Ship is a gripping history of stowaway slaves and the vessels that carried them to liberty. Up to 100,000 fugitives successfully fled the horrors of bondage in the American South. Many were ushered clandestinely northwards from safe house to safe house: know as the Underground Railway. Thousands of others escaped not by land, but by sea. Their dramatic tales of whispered conspiracy and billowing sails make Freedom Ship essential and enthralling reading. Through the intricate riverways of the Carolinas to the banks of the Chesapeake Bay, Freedom Ship traces the freedom seekers who turned their sights to the sea. Sailaways regularly arrived in Britain on cotton ships from New York or Southern ports. For example, Moses Roper, one of the most determined runaways in American history, traveled 350 miles through slave country before eventually taking a ship named the Napoleon to Liverpool. Both legendary abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman used the waterfront as a path to freedom. Marcus Rediker puts his command of archival research on full display in this luminous portrait of the Atlantic seaboard as a place of conspiracy, mutiny and liberation.

We live in an age in which extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from unfathomable sources, such as when tech firms that have never made a profit are valued at billions of dollars. While seeming extraordinary, this mode of acquiring unearned wealth is, in fact, commonplace. It is a key to understanding how capitalism came into being and a clue to grasping why the catastrophe of climate collapse has come upon us. The value is created by consuming the future. The Alibi of Capital asks how we came to organize collective life on the principle of capturing the future, explores the development of this principle in the imperial expansion of the West, and examines how lives today are encumbered by the repayment of earlier extractions. The book identifies the forms of capitalisation, credit, and coercion that turn prospective assets into present income. Rejecting the common idea that claims on the future create only financial or fictitious capital, it traces the terraforming projects-the destruction of rivers, the colonizing of territory, the expansion of infrastructures, and the burning of carbon-through which consuming the future has operated. Arguing that terms like finance, technology, the economy and its growth provide alibis that conceal this mode of extraction, it develops a new approach for understanding how the impoverishment operates.

In a Norwegian November, when it is dark at waking and dark at sleeping, a novelist in her sixties sits next to a teenaged girl at the opera, and through their padded jackets feels a dreadfully familiar tension conducted from the parents seated on her far side. She thinks back to her sixteenth year. The year she first got drunk and the year she first had sex with a boy. A year of being circled by an anxious, hawkish mother and, at a notable distance, her silent father. The year her family made an unspoken decision, and an unspeakable sacrifice.

Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of personhood has become essential-to debates about providing corporations human privileges, limiting access to abortion, giving algorithms free speech protections, releasing elephants from zoos, and permitting trees the standing to sue. The Personhood Problem reveals the unsettling connections between these imagined persons and their sought-after rights, in a bracing and nuanced examination of the versions of personhood proliferating today. Synthesizing the political and philosophical debates on personhood, the book uncovers the unexpected, disturbing, and dangerous alignments between them. Telling the true and engaging story of the oldest version of "fictional" personhood-the corporate one-this book helps us rethink that history and its use, or threat, to us now.

What happens when politics is everywhere, yet nothing seems to change? From the abandoned dance floors of Thatcher's London to the mass mobilizations of Black Lives Matter, Anton Jäger traces how pub­lic life has become infused with protest, spectacle, and moral urgency - while the old infrastructure of parties, unions, and civic solidarity has been hollowed out. Hyperpolitics revisits the illusions of the "end of history" and dissects the strange energies that replaced them: viral outrage, endless culture wars, and the digital rush of causes that flare and vanish overnight. Jäger shows how the promises of post-Cold War liberalism gave way to a restless, unsteady public sphere where private pas­sions overflow into politics but rarely build enduring power. Ranging from Guy Debord and Wolfgang Tillmans to Houellebecq's disenchanted fictions, Hyperpolitics makes sense of a world in which collective action remains fragmented and the social fabric thinner than ever. For anyone trying to grasp why our age feels so charged yet so incon­sequential, this book offers a vital map through the new contradictions of our hyperpolitical moment.

An engaging chapter-by-chapter guide to the most important economics text of the twentieth century John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money revolutionized economics. But it can be dense and cryptic, an intimidating work for the uninitiated. This companion volume approaches the argument methodically and with clarity, explaining obscure terms and breaking down Keynes’s ideas and their significance for his time and ours. Award-winning economist and author Geoff Mann allows readers to comprehend why the word “Keynesian” has become so contentious today — and so important.

The end goal of feminist revolution must be not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself. An international best-seller, first published in 1970 when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old, The Dialectic of Sex broke new ground in presenting a theory of politics for the women’s liberation movement. Firestone posits that feminism is the key radical ideology, the missing link between Marx and Freud, uniting the political with the personal. The book remains of pressing relevance today – a testament to Firestone’s startlingly prescience.

How Marx provides new insights into our environmental crisis when read alongside Darwin In this pathbreaking study, Joel Wainwright shows how deeply Darwin influenced Capital. Marx’s thinking about history and nature changed, generating a distinctive ecological critique of capitalism as a social formation. Marx even called Capital a study of natural history.

How technology and the attention economy has impacted contemporary art The ways we encounter contemporary art and performance is changing. Installations brim with archival documents. Dances stretch for weeks. Performances last a minute. Exhibitions are spread out over thirty venues. There are endless artworks about mid-century architecture and design. How are we expected to engage with today's diverse practise? Is the old model of close-looking still the ideal, or has it given way to browsing, skimming, and sampling? Across four essays, art historian and critic Claire Bishop identifies trends in contemporary practice - research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture - and their challenges to traditional modes of attention. Charting a critical path through the last three decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures of digital technology.

Unravelling the mystery of Alexandre Kojeve In this intellectual biography, critic and philosopher Boris Groys turns to the Arthur Rimbaud of modern bureaucracy, Alexandre Kojeve, a philosopher of little-known writings and profound influence. Koj?ve was fascinated with Hegel’s dialectics and with communism and envisioned a universal empire as the end of history. Kojeve drew on Buddhism and also proclaimed himself a Stalinist. At the same time, he was one of the creators of a nascent European Union. His concept of the human as something defined by negation and unique among animals in being separated from nature is highly political. It explains why humans can never be fully satisfied by a political system based on their allegedly ‘natural’ rights. Groys reveals a Kojeve with a unique perspective on our political capacities and human condition.

Who is allowed to hate? Hatred, this grating, corrosive feeling, is omnipresent, roaring from the streets or whispered in bourgeois homes. It thrives in parliamentary speeches, conspiracy theorists' fantasies and children's bedrooms - and certainly not in secret, even if many would like to see it restricted there. German bestselling author Seyda Kurt frees hatred from its banishment and sets out on the trail of its potential for resistance. She is particularly interested in people as subjects of hatred in a capitalist, racist and patriarchal world. Who are these haters and what power relations do they base them selves on? Who is allowed to hate? Which feelings paralyse, and which ones guide us to a fairer, more caring society? Ruthlessly, humorously and going beyond any self-righteous indignation, Seyda Kurt explores the possibility of a serviceable hatred that connects with people who feel a deep sense of discontent and helps us to find a collective way forward.

“Mingles an intellectual leftism with a Franciscan Catholicism.” —New Statesman Presented here for the first time in English is a remarkable screenplay about the apostle Paul by Pier Paolo Pasolini, legendary filmmaker, novelist, poet, and radical intellectual activist. Written between the appearance of his renowned film Teorema and the shocking, controversial Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, St Paul was deemed too risky for investors. At once a political intervention and cinematic breakthrough, the script forces a revolutionary transformation on the contemporary legacy of Paul. In Pasolini's kaleidoscope, we encounter fascistic movements, resistance fighters, and faltering revolutions, each of which reflects on aspects of the Pauline teachings. From Jerusalem to Wall Street and Greenwich Village, from the rise of SS troops to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr, here— as Alain Badiou writes in the foreword—"Paul's text crosses all these circumstances intact, as if it had foreseen them all." This is a key addition to the growing debate around St Paul and to the proliferation of literature centred on the current turn to religion in philosophy and critical theory, which embraces contemporary figures such as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben.