Reading list

Philosophy at the End of the World

Featuring Ben Ware, Elsa Dorlin, Judith Butler, Frédéric Gros, and more.

5 April 2024

Radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst but rather with beginning again at the end. To think about the future in this way is itself a form of liberation that might incubate the necessary radical solutions we need.

New books from Verso's Philosophy list includes Ben Ware's On Extinction: Beginning Again At The End, and New Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy for a Common World by Marina Garcés.

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On Extinction

by Ben Ware

On Extinction takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face ‘the end of all things’, Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without flinching...

On Extinction

by Ben Ware

New Radical Enlightenment

by Marina Garcés

Translated by Julie Wark

Philosophy was born out of discussion, out of the rivalry between world views. From the philosophical ferment of the Enlightenment arose the idea of emancipation, a conflictual perspective which Ma...

Disobey!

by Frédéric Gros

Translated by David Fernbach

The world is out of joint, so much so that disobeying should be an urgent act for everyone. In this provocative essay, Frédéric Gros explores the roots of political obedience, social conformity, ec...

Critique of Everyday Life

by Henri Lefebvre

The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now availabl...

Communism and Strategy

by Isabelle Garo

If the question of communism is making a comeback today, this renewed interest is often accompanied by an abandonment of any concrete political perspective. Critical philosophies are flourishing an...

A Philosophy of Walking

by Frédéric Gros

Translated by John Howe

By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history ... The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no...

Self-Defense

by Elsa Dorlin

Translated by Kieran Aarons

Is violent self-defense ethical? In the history of colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, there has long been a dividing line between bodies "worthy of defending" and those who have been disar...

The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing

by Andrew Feenberg

For several years after 1968, Herbert Marcuse was one of the most famous philosophers in the world. He became the face of Frankfurt School Critical Theory for a generation in turmoil. His fame rest...

Non-Places

by Marc Augé

Translated by John Howe

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge c...

The Future

by Marc Augé

Translated by John Howe

For Marc Augé, best-selling author of Non-Places, the prevailing idea of “the Future” rests on our present fears of the contemporary world. It is to the future that we look for redemption and pr...

The Force of Nonviolence

by Judith Butler

Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a pas...

The Poverty of Ethics

by Anat Matar

The Poverty of Ethics stands the usual moral-political dichotomy on its head. It argues that moral principles do not in fact underlie or inform political decisions. It is, rather, the conceptual pr...

Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

by Anna Kornbluh

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but f...

Psychopolitics

by Byung-Chul Han

Translated by Erik Butler

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower...

Humankind

by Timothy Morton

What is it that makes humans human? As science and technology challenge the boundaries between life and non-life, between organic and inorganic, this ancient question is more timely than ever. Accl...

Heroes

by Franco Berardi

What is the relationship between capitalism and mental health? Through an exhilarating mix of philosophical and psychoanalytical theory and reportage - from the suicide epidemic in Korea to the wav...

Frames of War

by Judith Butler

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...

Metaphilosophy

by Henri Lefebvre

Translated by David Fernbach

In Metaphilosophy, Henri Lefebvre works through the implications of Marx’s revolutionary thought to consider philosophy’s engagement with the world. Lefebvre takes Marx’s notion of the “world becom...

Minima Moralia

by Theodor Adorno

Translated by Edmund F.N. Jephcott

Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-cen...

Power and Resistance

by Yoshiyuki Sato

The "structuralist" theories of power show that the subject is produced and reproduced by the investment of power: but how then can we think of the subject's resistance to power? Based on this fund...

Aesthetics and Politics

by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács

Afterword by Fredric Jameson

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics...

The Destruction of Reason

by Georg Lukács

Introduction by Enzo Traverso

Translated by Peter Palmer

A classic of Western Marxism, The Destruction of Reason is Georg Lukács's trenchant criticism of German philosophy after Marx and the role it played in the rise of National Socialism. Originally pu...

The Benjamin Files

by Fredric Jameson

The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-p...

One-Way Street

by Walter Benjamin

Introduction by Susan Sontag

Translated by Edmund F.N. Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter

Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical writings...

Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche

by Henri Lefebvre

Translated by David Fernbach

Henri Lefebvre saw Marx as an ‘unavoidable, necessary, but insufficient starting point’, and always insisted on the importance of Hegel to understanding Marx. Metaphilosophy also suggested the sign...

The Politics of Friendship

by Jacques Derrida

Translated by George Collins

Jacques Derrida was one of most influential philosophers of the 20th century. In The Politics of Friendship he explores the idea of friendship and its political consequences, past and future in ord...

The Authoritarian Personality

by Theodor Adorno

What makes a fascist? Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? The Authoritarian Personality, written in the shadow of Fascism and the Holocaust, looked t...

Towards a New Manifesto

by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Translated by Rodney Livingstone

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of “critical theory”, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism...