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We live in an age of ever-deepening anxiety. Free of convictions, released from certainties, we appear untethered—and alone. The values that underpinned our sense of, and need for, collectivity have been reduced to their lowest common denominator: liberty means nothing more than exploiting our individuality; equality has become an empty political slogan; as for solidarity, it’s nowhere to be seen.

Such ruptures are neither accidental nor benign. The not-so-brave new social mandates are outgrowths of globalisation’s casualties: complete eclipsing of political sovereignty, gradual weakening of national identities, and breakdown of the welfare state. The situation is one of crisis.

In this revelatory contribution to political science and sociology, Constantine Tsoucalas draws upon a wide range of philosophical discourses to understand and diagnose our anxious, opiate-seeking age, and to suggest that identity and difference have been incorporated into the deepest substratum of capital, culminating in our times’ greatest woe: the extreme fetishization of the self.

This second edition includes a new introduction from the author and is a revised translation.

While working on ‘Bacon–Giacometti’, a major exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2018, the curator, writer, and art historian Michael Peppiatt carried out extensive research on the relationship between the two artists. “At one point I felt I could almost hear the two of them talking”, he revealed.

For Peppiatt, the dialogue between Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti has been ‘turning slowly’ in his mind ever since Bacon told him in detail about his encounters with the Swiss artist, while the latter was in London in 1965 to supervise the preparations for his major exhibition at the Tate. This book, written in the form of a play, is about an imagined encounter between the two men.

On the evening imagined by Peppiatt, Bacon and Giacometti enjoy a lavish dinner at Wheeler’s fish restaurant, then go on to the Colony Room—Bacon’s favourite club in Soho—to pursue their freely flowing conversation about life, art, and their mutual friends. After a while, the club begins to empty out, but the two artists, sensing that they may never have another occasion to talk, order more champagne...

“Ours is an ill-mannered society that wears those bad manners as a badge not just of its moral rectitude but of its millenarian ethical ambitions. At the same time, in no society in recent memory have people been so easily affronted.”

At a time when political writing and cultural criticism have come to be dominated by an insipid and unthinking moralism, David Rieff’s essays offer a bracing antidote. As well as being one of the English-speaking world’s most perceptive commentators on global politics, Rieff has in recent years been one of its most courageous and outspoken critics of the pathologies of identity politics—in particular, its grossly simplistic understanding of what it means to belong to a culture or a community, its fundamental failure to grasp the real value of the creative arts, and its increasing disregard for due process and freedom of expression.

The essays that appear in Desire and Fate serve both as a crucial record of and a fierce protest against these developments. Covering topics as diverse as censorship in contemporary publishing, the cultural ubiquity of the notion of trauma, and the future of democracy on a global level, they are all characterised by an incisive intelligence and a refreshing lack of wishful thinking. Together they confirm Rieff’s status as an indispensable writer and thinker.

Maurice Saatchi is dead.

He is standing in front of the Gates of Heaven. Arrival halls worse than Heathrow Airport. Queues. Overcrowding. A tidal wave of Paradise seekers. ID scans. Voice and facial recognition. X-ray examinations. Background checks. It all seems like a bad dream.

His tests expose abnormalities. He is charged with multiple breaches of immigration law and detained pending a full jury trial.

The verdict will reveal the biggest secret of all time: why some people go to Heaven and others to Hell.

Do Not Resuscitate is a bold statement. Maurice Saatchi, a towering figure in the worlds of business and politics, frames his unsparing self-portrait with the conceit of a celestial trial in which his application to pass through the Gates of Heaven is heard before a jury featuring luminaries like Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Chairman Mao, and Margaret Thatcher. In seeking admission to Heaven, Saatchi offers a defence like no other.

We are at one of those turning points that divide history into a ‘before’ and an ‘after.’ The ongoing transition from an information economy to an economy based in the workings of the brain and the mind has radical implications for human freedom and creativity, both of which are under threat from a rapacious, neurologically-oriented form of capitalism. Such moments require new languages in order for the unnamed, the unsayable, and the misunderstood to become known. This is the task taken on by Warren Neidich’s Glossary of Cognitive Activism, now appearing in an expanded and fully revised fourth edition. Each of its entries—which range in topic from the central nervous system and brain-computer interfaces to ChatGPT and conceptual art—explicates a key term in contemporary culture. The cumulative effect is astonishing: while every entry can profitably be read in isolation, the Glossary as a whole amounts to a brilliant account of the material brain’s entanglement with its surrounding environment.

For Neidich the human brain is far more than grey matter encased in a skull: it is profoundly integrated with the social, political, and cultural phenomena that constitute the world in which we live. For this reason, human cognition is profoundly vulnerable to the new despotism that is seeking in various ways to reshape it, but it also has the capacity to serve as the site of potent acts of resistance. Forging connections between such apparently disparate domains as neuroscience, ecology, political economy, and aesthetics, Neidich’s Glossary restores human cognition to its rightful status: not as the passive object of technological interventions or reductive theorizing, but as the starting point for any viable form of egalitarian and liberatory politics.

Hungry Ghosts sees the prize-winning poet Gabriele Tinti collaborate with the acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen on a unique artistic engagement with the furthest edges of life and consciousness. Drawing inspiration from the Petavatthu verses of the Buddhist tradition, Hungry Ghosts is a thrilling evocation of the disturbing visions and the yearnings for a world beyond that have fed both ancient and modern understandings of the afterlife.

Taking as their starting points the simplest of media—respectively the brief epigraphic verse and the photographic negative—Tinti and Ballen have produced something truly extraordinary: a masterfully crafted series of poems in dialogue with a stunning array of phantasmagoric images. Tinti’s verse has become renowned for its combination of rigorous sparseness on the level of diction with imagery of an extraordinary power and resonance. These qualities are once again much in evidence in Hungry Ghosts, but Tinti’s response to Ballen’s brilliant and disquieting works has also led him to explore an entirely new terrain: the uncanny borderlands between life and death.

“There is a common fallacy that is oddly and sadly even more widespread amongst non-philosophers than philosophers, that art is somehow explained by philosophy. It is not.”

The philosopher Simon Critchley has long been drawn to the distinctive questions raised by tragedy. In this major new work, conceived as a sequel to his Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (2019), he describes the power of tragic drama as deriving from its depictions of 'stuckness': of the inescapable situation of being oneself. In readings of Jean Racine, Henrik Ibsen, and Samuel Beckett, Critchley offers an exceptionally perceptive account of how tragedy dramatises this irreducibly absurd condition.

I Want to Die, I Hate My Life is at once a searching philosophical engagement with tragedy and a bracing argument against the widespread tendency to reduce literary texts to mere illustrations of philosophical ideas. Critchley’s exposition of the ambiguities that lie at the heart of tragic drama—of tragedy’s resistance to the kind of rational explanations that philosophers have sought to impose upon it—doesn’t just enhance our understanding of literature; it also points towards a wiser, more subtle, and more dynamic way of doing philosophy.

“Politics is will and not truth. A very primitive formulation, but rich in consequences.”

Robert Musil was keenly aware of literature’s vulnerability to what he called “the over-reach and encroachment of politics”, but he was also an acute observer of the ways in which literature and politics interact. Literature and Politics presents Musil’s writings on the relationship between literature and politics from World War I through World War II and elucidates his personal struggle to bear witness during the Age of Totalitarianism.

In essays, addresses, aphorisms, and unpublished notes on current events, Musil charted the increasing dangers posed to artists and intellectuals by projects of ideological conscription, as well as the broader threats posed by nationalism and other extreme forms of collectivism. His political thinking was unfailingly supple and nuanced, but at its heart was a passionate belief in the rich and irreducible nature of individual creative work as the bulwark of a free, ethical, and pluralistic society. The main texts are translated by Genese Grill and Klaus Amann provides an invaluable Introduction to Musil’s political thought, while Philip Payne introduces Musil's "On Stupidity" (which he has also translated into English).

Stanley Aronowitz was a towering figure on the American Left for over sixty years. Both a tireless organizer and a militant social and political theorist, Aronowitz was a highly perceptive analyst of class power. He was dedicated throughout his career to the development and circulation of conceptual weapons for the working class and for all those who faced oppression within American society.

Live Theory: The Stanley Aronowitz Reader brings together in thirteen seminal essays Aronowitz’s theoretical contributions to fundamental questions regarding science, class, culture, and education, alongside his pioneering interventions on labor, contract unionism, and the ongoing struggle for radical democracy. It is a crucial introduction to an indispensable thinker.

Long neglected by art historians, Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-87) was a painter of major importance who invested her work with an almost mystical ambition. The story of her life, told for the first time in this meticulously researched biography, is extraordinary: a Norwegian childhood that was constantly overshadowed by fear; a bohemian and adventurous youth that spanned much of Europe; a career as an illustrator; encounters in Nazi Germany; increasingly severe health problems; three marriages, two of which were to the same man (Bergman’s fellow artist Hans Hartung); and a tragic end in the splendour of their villa in Antibes.

But above all Bergman’s was a life dedicated to creation, often in defiance of fashion. Only recently has the scale of her achievement begun to be adequately acknowledged. Bergman undoubtedly enjoyed a distinguished career, crossing paths with such key artists as Wassily Kandinsky, Pierre Soulages and Mark Rothko. In many respects, however, she remained a marginal figure—little known in her homeland, and championed by only a handful of allies in France and the rest of Europe.

Characterised by the use of gold and silver leaf and by the distinctive rhythm of her lines, Bergman’s paintings are hieratic and simplified, radical evocations of the great structuring forces of the universe—minerals, the elements, and even time itself. Thomas Schlesser’s biography, which draws upon the considerable body of written material that Bergman left behind, at long last enables us to understand this extraordinary artist in all the complexity of her character and the dramatic circumstances of her life.

In July 1980 London’s National Gallery paid a record sum for a canvas that purported to be Peter Paul Rubens’s Samson and Delilah (1609). But as the artist and art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis has long maintained, the painting is not the work of Rubens at all, but rather a copy of his original. Notwithstanding the formidable body of historical and stylistic evidence that supports Doxiadis’s assessment, the National Gallery has not only continued to defend its attribution of the canvas to Rubens, but it has also refused to allow a thorough, independent analysis of the painting’s material structure.

In NG6461: The Fake Rubens, Doxiadis gives a riveting account of her own investigations, and of her efforts—often in the face of hostility and ridicule—to convince the British art establishment of the truth about Samson and Delilah. But the implications of this case extend well beyond the authorship of a single painting. At a time when major galleries in continental Europe and the United States are opening themselves up to innovative research methods and to a broader spirit of open-minded enquiry, some of the most influential figures in Britain’s cultural life are insulating themselves from these trends—very often prioritising face-saving and the maintenance of opaque social networks over the legitimate interests of the art-loving, and tax-paying, public. NG6461: Copy in the Manner of Peter Paul Rubens is an unforgettable account of what has gone wrong in the art world.

Denouncing racism and celebrating diversity have become central to progressive politics. For many on the left, it seems, social justice would consist of an equitable distribution of wealth, power and esteem among racial groups. But as Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels argue in this incisive collection of essays, the emphasis here is tragically misplaced. Not only can a fixation with racial disparities distract from the pervasive influence of class, it can actually end up legitimising economic inequality. As Reed and Michaels put it, “racism is real and anti-racism is both admirable and necessary, but extant racism isn’t what principally produces our inequality and anti-racism won’t eliminate it”.

No Politics but Class Politics gathers together Reed and Michaels’s recent essays on inequality, along with a newly commissioned interview with the authors and an illuminating foreword by Daniel Zamora and Anton Jäger. These writings eschew the sloppy thinking and moral posturing that too often characterise discussions of race and class in favour of clear-eyed social, cultural and historical analysis. Reed and Michaels make the case here for a genuinely radical politics: a politics which aspires not to the establishment of a demographically representative social elite, but instead to economic justice for everyone.

Nothing Alien spans thirty-five years of Lee Siegel’s career. Exploring figures as varied as Fra Angelico and Sophia Loren, James Baldwin and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marilynne Robinson and Quentin Tarantino, Siegel is unique among American critics for the breadth of his subjects and the striking originality of his insights.

He has analyzed politics and politicians from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. He has reflected on the culture of vulgarity, welcomed the so-called 'death of the humanities', defended the American suburb and the American department store, attacked the idea of women in combat, and called, in one particularly influential and incendiary essay, on people crushed by student debt to walk away from their loans. He has eviscerated American pragmatism, reinterpreted European modernism, drawn connections between antidepressants and the decline of democratic empathy, and deplored the death of the senses. He has written personal reminiscences of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Frank Kermode, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, and Lewis Lapham, and he has composed intimate personal essays about fatherhood, baseball, and mortality.

Celebrated, and vilified, for his acid pen, he reveals himself here as both ferocious and tender, bristling with compassion and overflowing with spleen. Siegel has stepped on every imaginable toe, but the peculiar shape of his genius is an inescepable fact, and everyone will be talking about this remarkable collection of work.

“A physical orgasm is a blissful body experience. An intellectual orgasm is a blissful mental experience. The record seems to show that it is easier to have a physical orgasm than an orgasm of the mind.”

Maurice Saatchi is one of the few genuine iconoclasts. In an age of polite conformists and faux-contrarians, Saatchi can justifiably claim to have revolutionised British business and politics through his willingness to question received wisdom. In Orgasm he offers readers an unforgettable mental experience as he debunks some of the modern world’s most fondly held delusions.

In chapters ranging from etiquette to geopolitics, Saatchi takes on a series of contemporary shibboleths, among them “Dinner Parties Are Fun”, “Conservatives Are Cruel”, and “We Will Rest in Peace”. As thought-provoking as it is witty and pugnacious, Orgasm is an essential guide to seeing and thinking more clearly.

“when I admire a film | they say to me | yes, it’s very pretty | but it’s not | cinema | so | I asked myself | what it was”

Phrases presents the spoken language from six films by Jean-Luc Godard: Germany Nine Zero, The Kids Play Russian, JLG / JLG, 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema, For Ever Mozart, and In Praise of Love. Completed between 1991 and 2001, during what has been called Godard’s “years of memory”, these films and videos were made alongside and in the shadow of his major work from that time, the monumental Histoire(s) du cinema, complementing and extending its themes. Like Histoire(s), they offer meditations on, among other things, the tides of history, the fate of nations, the work of memory, the power of cinema, and the nature of love.

Gathered here, in written form, they are words without images: not exactly screenplays, not exactly poetry, but something else entirely. Godard himself described them enigmatically: “Not books. Rather recollections of films, without the photos or the uninteresting details… Only the spoken phrases. They offer a little prolongation. One even discovers things that aren’t in the films in them, which is rather powerful for a recollection. These books aren’t literature or cinema. Traces of a film…”. In our era of ubiquitous video streaming, e-books, and social media, these traces of cinema raise compelling questions about the future of media—cinematic, literary, and otherwise.

Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century is a revisionary account of the forms of thought and belief that have been rejected or suppressed by orthodox Christianity over the course of the centuries. Formidably erudite without ever drifting into dry scholasticism, Resistance to Christianity ranges from the origins of the Bible to the fraught doctrinal controversies of the fourth century to the Levellers and Jansenists of the early modern period, thereby revealing the too-little-known history that lies behind the modern world’s theological horizons.

Resistance to Christianity is far more, however, than a study of religious movements and ideas; indeed, Vaneigem is bracingly unapologetic in his ambition “to examine the resistance that the inclination to natural liberty has, for nearly twenty centuries, opposed to . . . Christian oppression.” The story of how men and women have again and again resisted the authoritarian implications of religious orthodoxy is, above all, a crucial strand of the history of human freedom.

Bill Brown’s translation makes available in English a major work by one of the preeminent thinkers of our time. A remarkable feat of historical scholarship that deserves to be widely read, Resistance to Christianity represents radical thought at its most exciting, incisive, and compelling.

Lucas Samaras was one of the great avant-garde artists of the last few decades. Renowned both for his use of fabrics and for his deployment of everyday objects in his installations, he was perhaps best known for his work in photography, where he frequently took himself as a subject. This lavishly illustrated volume is the authoritative biography of a consummate self-portraitist and a riveting depiction of a paradoxical personality: of an artist whose work in the 1960s and ’70s “prefigured the vindicated narcissism of the selfie era”, but who also showed every sign of being “a quiet and agoraphobic maverick at war with the mindset of calculated sociability”.

From his sensitive evocation of Samaras’s childhood in wartime Greece through to his perceptive interpretation of the artist’s career in the United States, Michael Skafidas has produced an outstanding account of his subject’s life and work. It is also an intriguing record of his own relationship with Samaras, and a powerful meditation on the art of life-writing.

Socialisme ou Barbarie (1948–67) was a revolutionary group whose members included such major figures such as Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Jean-François Lyotard. Its journal of the same name helped inspire France’s May ’68 student-worker rebellion and influenced generations of radicals worldwide. This Anthology, for the first time in print in the English language, restores the collective nature of the group’s adventure, where manual and intellectual workers creatively, and not without profound disagreements, reflected and acted together in anticipation of a non-hierarchical, self-governing society.

The group radically reoriented critical revolutionary theory by affirming how social change emerges through ordinary people’s everyday lives and struggles. In a world divided into two competing bureaucratic-capitalist camps, the autonomous grassroots response to rationalized forms of outside control (State-corporation-trade union-political party) would be workers’ management—a conclusion stunningly confirmed, against traditional Left expectations, by the workers’ revolts of 1953 and 1956 in the East, and by increasingly widespread challenges to established organizational forms in the 1960s in the West.

These texts not only examine the overall crisis of systems of domination, but explore their creative contestation in the workplace, in changing relations between the sexes and between generations, and in movements for national liberation (China, Algeria), to bring out “the positive content of socialism” while remaining clear-eyed about how bureaucratization may be reintroduced into emancipatory struggles.

The philosopher Antonio Negri was one of the preeminent thinkers of our time: his writings on class, socialism, and empire have had an enormous influence on contemporary political theory. His political activism and outspoken advocacy for the downtrodden also placed him at the centre of some of the most dramatic developments in recent Italian history. Story of a Communist—the first volume of Negri’s three-part autobiography—gives a riveting account of his intellectual development and of the price he paid for living out his ideals.

Negri paints a vivid portrait of the ferment in which some of his most important arguments and ideas took shape, and he provides crucial context for an understanding of the operaismo movement and of the influence that it continues to exert. Story of a Communist is also a very personal work, however: it is a compelling and often moving narrative of a childhood overshadowed by fascism, and of the ways in which Negri’s later political interventions were shaped by his profoundly important relationships with comrades and collaborators.

This first volume traces the author’s involvement with left-wing politics in the post-war period, recounting in fascinating detail his efforts to marry together his early intellectual work with his commitment to militant labour activism. It also provides an indispensable ground-level perspective on the increasingly repressive measures taken by the Italian government in response to the social movements 1960s and ‘70s, with the narrative culminating in a gripping description of Negri’s own arrest in 1979 for alleged involvement in terrorist activities. This is, in short, a powerful record of an extraordinary life, and of the historical forces that shaped it.

“One must make films with this knowledge: there’s no point anymore. Let film meet its end, that’s the only cinema.”

The Darkroom contains the script for Marguerite Duras’s 1977 radically experimental film Le camion (The Truck). Between images of a truck in motion, juxtaposed voiceovers, and cutaways to Duras in conversation with Gérard Depardieu, Le camion turns the art of film into a means of enabling the viewer to engage multiple faculties—not only the visual and the aural, but also memory, imagination, and desire.

Also included here is a series of short essays in which Duras makes provocative connections between film and textuality, as well as a fascinating dialogue with Michelle Porte. Together amounting to a crucial contribution to the field of film theory, these texts make brilliantly apparent the depth and integrity of Duras’s aesthetic, philosophical, and political thinking.

“The real obstacle to the development of modern art forms is erudition, conscious knowledge, and an excess of knowledge: all growth and development in the realm of art has to take place in the dead of night.”

The Greek Music Drama marks a significant moment in the development of Nietzsche’s thought. Delivered as a lecture in 1870, it was the first public articulation of the major themes of his later, philosophical work: the importance of aesthetic experience for culture, the primacy of the body and physiological drives, and the centrality of music to Greek tragedy. Nietzsche here repudiates abstract scholarly approaches to the art of classical antiquity, proposing instead that that art demands of us the cultivation of distinctive emotional and intellectual capacities.

While The Greek Music Drama was written on the brink of the insights that inform The Birth of Tragedy, it stands as a fascinating document in its own right. Paul Bishop’s preface and informative critical notes and Jill Marsden’s illuminating introduction serve to redress the comparative neglect that this seminal text—presented here in an elegant bilingual format—has suffered in Nietzsche studies. They also set in its original context a work that will prove essential to anyone interested in theater, performance, and the art of tragedy.

In an era when intellectual and artistic life is increasingly being distorted by political dogmatism, Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals is a classic that speaks with a new and extraordinary urgency. Benda’s essay, published by ERIS in a new translation by David Broder, offers an incisive account of interwar Europe that ranges from the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Sorel to the activities of Charles Maurras and Benito Mussolini. It also serves, however, as a remarkably timely warning against the seduction of modern intellectuals by tribal loyalties and antipathies.

Rather than detaching themselves from communal ties as their forebears had done, Benda argues that twentieth-century European intellectuals willingly subordinated the disinterested pursuit of truth to the servicing of group interests (particularly the interests of their own nations and social classes). Partisan agendas had a corrosive effect not only on moral and political philosophy, but also on the writing of history and fiction. With its penetrating analyses of nationalism and of the tensions between group identity and intellectual freedom, Treason of the Intellectuals is as necessary a book in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth.

“Sincerity is the one great artistic crime. Insincerity is the second greatest.”

In addition to his literary and fictional works, Fernando Pessoa wrote a multiplicity of theoretical texts concerning literature and aesthetics. In Writings on Art and Poetical Theory we see Pessoa exploring, under the guise of various heteronyms, general theories on poetics, the poetry produced by his other heteronyms, and the uses and abuses of criticism. Also included are essays on translation, the sensationist movement, and the history of English literature.

This edition, prepared by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza, provides a fascinating overview of Pessoa’s writings on art and poetic theory—most of which are presented here for the first time to English readers—thereby opening the way for future studies on one of the most significant authors of Portuguese modernism.