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Foucault: a Verso bookshelf

Calling all Foucault fans! We have 40% off all our reading relating to the work and theory of Michel Foucault. Ends March 31, 23.59 EST.

Verso Books26 March 2019

© 2019 Martine Franck/Magnum Photos

Three decades after his death, Michel Foucault remains one of the towering intellectual figures of the last half-century. Thomas Lemke's new study - Foucault’s Analysis of Modern Governmentality - offers the most comprehensive and systematic account of Michel Foucault’s work on power and government from 1970 until his death in 1984 (read an excerpt here!).

To mark the publication of this critical new work, we have 40% off ALL our reading relating to the work and theory of Michel Foucault. Ends March 31, 23.59 EST. See all the books included below.

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Lemke offers the most comprehensive and systematic account of Michel Foucault’s work on power and government from 1970 until his death in 1984. He convincingly argues, using material that has only partly been translated into English, that Foucault’s concern with ethics and forms of subjectivation is always already integrated into his political concerns and his analytics of power. The book also shows how the concept of government was taken up in different lines of research in France before it gave rise to “governmentality studies” in the anglophone world. A Critique of Political Reason provides a clear and well-structured exposition that is theoretically challenging but also accessible for a wider audience. Thus, the book can be read both as an original examination of Foucault’s concept of government and as a general introduction to his “genealogy of power’.

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Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West argues that critical theory continues to offer valuable resources for critique and contestation during this turbulent period in our history. To assess these resources, it examines the work of two of the twentieth century’s more prominent social theorists: Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault.

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From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the famous Collège de France. Attended by thousands, they created the benchmarks for contemporary social enquiry. In this book, these seminal events are collected together.

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When he died of an AIDS-related condition in 1984, Michel Foucault had become the most influential French philosopher since the end of World War Two. His powerful studies have had a lasting impact on philosophers, historians, critics, and novelists the world over. But as public as he was in his militant campaigns on behalf of prisoners, dissidents, and homosexuals, he shrouded his personal life in mystery. In The Lives of Michel Foucault David Macey gives the richest account to date of Foucault’s life and work, informed as it is by the complex issues arising from his writings.

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A lucid and elegant survey of Foucault's corpus, as well as a major intervention in the debate over the nature of Foucault's work.

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In this book Dominique Lecourt presents an exposition of Bachelard's epistemological writings and then offers a critique of that epistemology and of the works of Canguilhem and Foucault from a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint. In an introduction written especially for the English edition he compares Bachelard's positions with those of the different, but in some respects analogous, Anglo-Saxon traditions in epistemology descending from the works of Karl Popper, in particular with Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

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In this established classic, sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello get to the heart of contemporary capitalism.

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A definitive collection of Bentham’s work on the modelprison, key to Foucault’s theory of power.

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Analyzing the different frames through which we experience war, Butler calls for a reorientation of the Left.

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The Hegelian legacy, Left strategy, and post-structuralism versus Lacanian psychoanalysis.

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Pits the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan against the historicist approach of Michel Foucault to develop a profound critique of historicism.

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In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, filmmakers such as Godard and Bresson, and thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard and Greenberg, Rancière shows that contemporary theorists of the image are suffering from religious tendencies.

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Over forty years of French philosophy through the eyes of its greatest living exponent.

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A new vision of politics “below the radar”.

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A far-reaching deconstruction of neoliberalism’s economic agenda, political imposition and mystifying techniques.

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A journey through twentieth-century philosophy with the titan of French thought.

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What have been the major changes in the intellectual landscape of the left since the mid seventies? Have they on balance represented an emancipation or a retreat for socialist culture as a whole? In the Tracks of Historical Materialism looks at some of the paradoxes in the evolution of Marxist thought in this period.

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A major work of Marxist theory—rigorous, clear-minded and well-researched.

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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.

Foucault's Analysis of Modern Governmentality
Lemke offers the most comprehensive and systematic account of Michel Foucault’s work on power and government from 1970 until his death in 1984. He convincingly argues, using material that has only ...
Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West
Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West argues that critical theory continues to offer valuable resources for critique and contestation during this turbulent period in our history. To assess...
Abnormal
Three decades after his death, Michel Foucault remains one of the towering intellectual figures of the last half-century. His works on sexuality, madness, the prison, and medicine are enduring clas...
The Lives of Michel Foucault
When he died of an AIDS-related condition in 1984, Michel Foucault had become the most influential French philosopher since the end of World War II. His powerful studies of the creation of modern m...
Paperback
Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

The reception of Michel Foucault’s work has often been divided between two unsatisfactory alternatives. On the one hand there are those who admire the detail of his concrete analysis, but wonder ho...
Paperback
Marxism and Epistemology
When this book was first published in English in 1975, the previous forty years had seen the emergence of a new tradition in the philosophy of the sciences, or 'epistemology' in France. The founder...
The New Spirit of Capitalism
In this major work, sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello go to the heart of the changes in contemporary capitalism. Via an unprecedented analysis of the latest management texts that have fo...
The Panopticon Writings
The Panopticon project for a model prison obsessed the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham for almost 20 years. In the end, the project came to nothing; the Panopticon was never built. But it is pre...
Frames of War
In this urgent response to violence, racism and increasingly aggressive methods of coercion, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of armed conflict, a process integral to how the West prose...
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci’s notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking proj...
Read My Desire
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 disciplines—psychoanalysis and histor...
The Future of the Image
In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. He argues ...
The Adventure of French Philosophy
The Adventure of French Philosophy is essential reading for anyone interested in what Badiou calls the “French moment” in contemporary thought.Badiou explores the exceptionally rich and varied worl...
Unexceptional Politics
Unexceptional Politics develops a vocabulary of terms drawn from a wide range of media (political fiction, art, film, and TV serials), highlighting the scams, imbroglios, information trafficking, b...
Hardback
The New Way of the World
Exploring the genesis of neoliberalism, and the political and economic circumstances of its deployment, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval dispel numerous common misconceptions. Neoliberalism is nei...
Pocket Pantheon
Pocket Pantheon is an invitation to engage with the greats of postwar Western thought, such as Lacan, Sartre and Foucault, in the company of one of today’s leading political and philosophical minds...
Paperback
In the Tracks of Historical Materialism
What have been the major changes in the intellectual landscape of the left since the mid seventies? Have they on balance represented an emancipation or a retreat for socialist culture as a whole? I...
Paperback
Logics of Disintegration
Over the last two decades, contemporary French philosophy has exercised a powerful influence on intellectual life, across both Europe and America. Post-structuralist strategies and concepts have pl...
Paperback
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
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 soci...