If you think the latest tome of Giddens’ Sociology is the one textbook you need to get you through your undergraduate days, think again. Impress your tutor and learn something beyond the lecture theatre with these essential Verso titles.
Bolster any politics, philosophy, economics, literature, sociology or history essay with one of these books and not only score the grade, but begin your lifelong love affair with radical writers.
We're pleased to finally post video from our Communism, A New Beginning? conference from back in October in the debut of our incredibly novel YouTube page. It's an interesting look back to a weekend of what was the first month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street; around when Étienne Balibar spoke on "Communism as Commitment, Imagination, and Politics," peaceful protesters just uptown at Times Square were arrested and en route to Central Booking.
Here is a guide to the talks given at this conference:
DAY 1
Alain Badiou: Politics and State, Mass Movement and Terror (presented by Bruno Bosteels)
Two giants of French philosophy discuss psychology, Western culture and the Kantian turn in the history of philosophy in this hidden gem of a video. Michel Foucault is interviewed by Alain Badiou, the acclaimed author of many books including Pocket Pantheon, and the forthcoming The Adventure of French Philosophy (2012), which both engage with Foucault's thought.
Lamenting the ubiquity of the seasonal "best of" lists, Our Man in Boston (aka Robert Birnbaum)—happy as he is to "skirt the perimeter of hypocrisy"—has done his very own list. We should hasten to add however, that unlike other lists ("one cannot avoid a suspicion of cynicism amongst the editors and editorial chosen who spew out this stuff") this list will "at least incite some brain activity."
And indeed it will, for featured on the list are all three titles from Verso's "Pocket Communism" series: Alain Badiou's Pocket Pantheon and The Communist Hypothesis and Boris Groys' The Communist Postscript.
Birnbaum closes his list quoting Joe Bageant, "How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked?" Perhaps it's down to the "effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp." Whatever it is, a bit of Badiou and a bit of Groys will certainly help ...