Radical Thinkers Set 6: Win the complete new set!
Thank you to all who took part in our Radical Thinkers competition. Our lightening-fast winners have now been notified. We've added the answers you've all been waiting for below!
To celebrate the release of the Set 6 of Radical Thinkers titles, Verso is offering two readers the chance to win the complete set of 12 beautiful books. Continue reading for the full details of how to enter.
First launched in 2005, Radical Thinkers are key works from the world's most important philosophers in stylish and affordable editions. Covering the full spectrum of critical thought, the series includes work from radical thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Henri Lefebvre, Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno and many more.
Two lucky readers will recieve the complete new set of 12 titles, including Metapolitics by Alain Badiou, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory by Ernesto Laclau and Ethics of the Real by Alenka Zupančič.
There will be 6 questions in total, each relating to a title from Set 6 of the Radical Thinkers series. One fiendishly difficult question will be posted each working day from today.
The final questions will be posted at 4pm GMT on Wednesday 25th January. The winners will be the first person in each territory (North America and UK and ROW) to email the collated, correct answers to all six questions after that time, when more details on how to enter will be posted.
Please do not post the answers on Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else—entries accepted by email only. Any comments posting the answers will be deleted.
Questions
1. In his address on the centenary of Mahler's birth, Adorno comments on the Austrian tradition within the composer's work.Listening to his Ninth Symphony, Adorno is reminded of a traditional Ländler, or dance, played upon which instrument?
ANSWER: The Fiddle
2. Reminiscing upon his childhood, Sartre insists that although he wasn't ugly, he was preparing to become so, and wished for people to be charmed not by his looks, but by his creative works. He looked for comparisons in literature; whilst enchanted by Zamacoïs' Les Bouffons, he was "shocked and distressed" by which semi-fictionalised literary figure?
ANSWER: Cyrano de Bergerac
3. Alain Badiou devotes a chapter of Metapolitics to examining the "Thermidoreans", a counter-revolutionary movement against the Terror in the French Revolution. The men of Fréron, a revolutionary leader who turned on Robespierre as part of the Thermidorean Reaction, we known as the jeunesse dorée, or "gilded youth". According to Badiou, what was the war cry of this militia?
ANSWER: "Down with the Jacobins!"
4. According to Althusser, the act of using the dialectic to question the dialectic is what constituted "the grandeur" of which political figure?
ANSWER: Chairman Mao
5. Artists Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel's 1997 work 'Ein Haus für Schweine und Menschen' is, according to Jean Baudrillard, an updated rendering of which 17th Century painting?
ANSWER: Velázquez's Las Meninas
6. Henri Lefebvre thought the influence of the Russian Revolution on French culture can not be underestimated. Without which Russian cultural export, according to Lefebvre, would the art of Pablo Picasso have been impossible?
ANSWER: Diaghilev's Ballet Russes
If you are entering from North America, please send your entries to verso@versobooks.com
If you are entering from the UK, Europe or the rest of the world, please send your entries to enquiries@verso.co.uk
Please use the subject line RADICAL THINKERS COMPETITION. The winner will be the first person in each territory to submit correct answers to all 6 questions. Good luck!