New Works of Theory in Context
Theory never takes place in a void. The greatest advances often come through work that finds a way of engaging critically with arguments of the past, building on them and putting a new spin on the deepest questions of politics, economics, psychology, culture, and social life. The list below is organized around conversations between texts, from new releases to Verso classics.
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Art and Aesthetics
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"Anna Kornbluh brilliantly reinvigorates critique for an age drowning under the deluge of self-presentation. Embracing structure over style, representation over personalization, and collectivity over narcissism, she creates a space for thinking -- the necessary space for politics." – Jodi Dean, author of Comrade
Read Immediacy with:
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"Dominique Routhier's innovative analysis transcends the discipline of art history, allowing us to link early 20th century avant-garde struggles against the alienated separation of art and labour with all the nuances of the SI imperative. Given our anxieties today about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on labour and art, Routhier's study could not be more timely." – Abigail Susik, author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work
Read With and Against with:
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Psychology and Social Theory
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"Drawing on Marx, Spinoza, and popular film, Jason Read builds an illuminating analysis that not only astutely captures, but also helps to make sense of, our double experience of wage work as a locus of freedom and compulsion, hope and fear, self-actualization and self-impoverishment, love and hate. This book is a must read for students of contemporary capitalism." – Kathi Weeks, Duke University
Read The Double Shift with:
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Technology, Automation and A.I.
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"Georgina Voss thoughtfully explores the dizzying operations and implications of the vast machineries that dominate contemporary life, without ever losing sight of their everyday physicality: their meat and flesh, silicon and steel. A brilliant and hugely enjoyable read." – James Bridle, author of New Dark Age
Read Systems Ultra with:
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"In this original and extremely timely book, Matteo Pasquinelli offers nothing less than a long-range history and critical analysis of a labour theory of automation and knowledge. [...] At a moment when apostles and prophets of machine intelligence proclaim both a utopian world of effortless control and a catastrophe of extinction, Pasquinelli's patient and clever work provides a crucial insight into the past and future of AI monopolies and their consequences." – Simon Schaffer, author of Babbage’s Intelligence (1994) and OK computer (2001)
Read The Eye of the Master with:
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Political Theory
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"In this fascinating and wide-ranging book, Beaumont reminds us that walking is far from a neutral activity; it is, rather, “irreducibly political”. With the help of Frantz Fanon, Beaumont locates freedom at the level of the body; free from the systems of oppression, exploitation, and harassment." – Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse
Read How We Walk with:
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Economic Theory
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"Not a day goes by without a question imposing itself on the minimally sane mind: how can all this shit around us just go on? In this masterful study, Søren Mau methodically drills into the core of the matter: the deeply entrenched power of some people over others, and of capital over everyone." – Andreas Malm, author of How To Blow Up A Pipeline
Read Mute Compulsion with:
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Fascism
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"There are no unearned claims here. Rather, one feels that Toscano has thought through the political stakes of every single sentence in this crucial book. Late Fascism is painstaking in accounting for, differentiating, and connecting the many historical contexts and iterations of fascism - from the onset of colonial modernity, through the mid-twentieth century, to the present day." – Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
Read Late Fascism with:
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Black Radicalism
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"A fiercely argued case for looking to the anticolonialism and Marxism of Red Africa in our current engagements with decolonisation. Okoth's critical assessment of certain variants of 'decolonial studies' and 'Afro-Pessimism' is welcome." –
Read Red Africa with:
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The Frankfurt School
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"That Martin Jay is not only the leading historian of the Frankfurt School, but one of its most creative and interesting practitioners in the third generation, becomes irrevocably apparent in this superb collection of articles. Circling around the notion of "immanent critique", these articles explore the viability of some of this tradition's core ideas in a time of political turbulences and postcolonial challenges. In so doing, Martin Jay teaches us how to actualize Critical Theory without credulously sticking to the original texts." – Axel Honneth
Read Immanent Critiques with:
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