Edited and with an Introduction by JILL LLOYD
Translated by ULRICH BAER
Translated by ULRICH BAER
The Modersohn-Becker/
Rilke Correspondence
Rilke Correspondence
OUT JUNE 2024
Paperback
Publishes June 2024
Extent: 120 pages
ISBN: 9781916809901
Price: £15 / £10 (ebook)
The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke were two of the most talented and original creative artists at work in early twentieth-century Europe. They enjoyed a close friendship that left in its wake a remarkable series of letters. Encompassing topics such as art, literature, and the nature of marriage, their correspondence testifies to both writers’ brilliant descriptive gifts and penetrating social intelligence. Brought together in English for the first time, the letters that Modersohn-Becker and Rilke sent to one another provide a fascinating view of everyday life during an exceptionally fertile and exciting period of cultural production.
JILL LLOYD is an art historian and curator. She has co-edited numerous exhibition catalogues and is the author of German Expressionism, Primitivism and Modernity and The Undiscovered Expressionist: A Life of Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky.
EUPHROSYNE DOXIADIS
NG6461
Copy in the Manner of
Peter Paul Rubens
Copy in the Manner of
Peter Paul Rubens
OUT JUNE 2024
Paperback
Publishes June 2024
Extent: 212 pages
Trim: 13 x 23 cm
Price: £20 / £10 (ebook)
Long-held doubts about the authenticity of the National Gallery’s masterpiece, bought for £2.5m in 1980, are backed by pioneering technology.
––The Observer
The painting bought by the gallery for a staggering sum in 1980 is not by Rubens.
––Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times
It has all the ingredients of a delicious art mystery; involving one of the world’s most valuable paintings, the reputation of an old master, and claims of a cover-up at the National Gallery.
––Jeevan Vasagar, The Guardian
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: Copy in the Manner of Peter Paul 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.
Over the years, several critics have questioned the Rubens attribution for the museum’s Samson and Delilah, including artist and independent scholar Euphrosyne Doxiadis who has claimed in several papers and interviews that certain details didn’t add up. […] The recent discovery using AI technology is just another strike against the piece.
––ARTnews
The dispute over [the painting’s] authorship pits […] Euphrosyne Doxiades and her supporters—unassuming Davids in a story about an artist whose subjects were often drawn from history and myth—against the Goliath of one of the world’s most venerated art repositories.
––Edward M. Gomez, Der Spiegel
STANLEY ARONOWITZ
Edited by Peter Bratsis, Bruno Gulli, Kristin Lawler, and Michael Pelias
Edited by Peter Bratsis, Bruno Gulli, Kristin Lawler, and Michael Pelias
LIVE THEORY
The Stanley Aronowitz Reader
The Stanley Aronowitz Reader
OUT MAY 2024
Flapped Paperback
Publishes May 2024
Extent: 348 pages
Trim: 13 x 23 cm
Price: £20 / £10 (ebook)
One of America’s most prominent social theorists.
––The Brooklyn Rail
Stanley Aronowitz is a national treasure.
––Peter McLaren, UCLA
Stanley Aronowitz is the most important scholar on the past and present US working class.
––Cornel West
Stanley Aronowitz (1933–2001) 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.
Stanley was a distinguished scholar of labor, work, unions, class, education, American politics, and Marxism. […] [False Promises] is the most wide-ranging exploration of working-class consciousness I’ve ever read. […] A fighting left needs more people like him […].
––Jamie McCallum, Jacobin
Through his radical and relentless pursuit of knowledge and justice, Aronowitz provided a blueprint for living an intellectual life that matters to those of us who refuse to accept the status quo.
––Eric Weiner, Montclair State University
ANTONIO NEGRI
Translated by Ed Emery
Translated by Ed Emery
STORY OF A COMMUNIST
A Memoir
A Memoir
OUT APRIL 2024
Flapped Paperback
Publishes April 2024
Extent: 312 pages
Trim: 13 x 23 cm
Price: £25 / £10 (ebook)
I find it necessary to come to terms with Negri’s militant and intellectual career, described here with an honesty that must be recognized even if it disturbs us.
––Gad Lerner
It would be simplistic to consider Story of a Communist solely as the autobiography of Toni Negri. The story experienced in the first person is transfigured into the story of a generation of militants.
––Dario Gentili, Il Manifesto
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 fascinating 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, describing 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 riveting account of Negri’s own his 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.
ANTONIO NEGRI (1933–2023) was an Italian philosopher and political activist. Formerly a professor of philosophy at the University of Padua, he was a prominent figure in the left-wing operaismo movement in the 1960s and ’70s. He was best known for his writings on globalization—particularly the highly influential volume Empire (co-authored with Michael Hardt)—but he has also written on subjects as various as Vladimir Lenin, Baruch Spinoza, and the Book of Job.
ED EMERY is an ethnomusicologist based at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He has published translations from Arabic, French, Greek, Italian, and Spanish, including numerous works by Antonio Negri and the Nobel laureate Dario Fo.
ORGASM
OUT 23 APRIL 2024
Clothbound hardcover
Shipping box
35 Illustrations
Extent: 264 pages
Trim: 22 x 32 cm
Price: $100 / £80
“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.
JEAN COCTEAU
Introduced by Pierre Caizerguess
Translated by Juliet Powys
Introduced by Pierre Caizerguess
Translated by Juliet Powys
SECRETS OF BEAUTY
Flapped Paperback
Out Now
Extent: 48 pages
Trim: 13 x 23 cm
Price: £13
Cocteau managed to pursue a half-dozen careers with greater success than the most disciplined professional manages to pursue in a single one.
––Kevin McMahon, Los Angeles Review of Books
A genuine renaissance man.
––Susan King, Los Angeles Times
Cocteau left behind a body of work
unequalled for its variety of artistic expression.
––Annette Insdorf, The New York Times
A bold innovator in ballet, film,
theater, and creative writing.
––David Carrier, Artforum
“Discomfort is the hallmark of the poet. His world is almost uninhabitable. People sense this. They enter it as little as possible, as quickly as possible, and only out of curiosity.”
Widely celebrated for his work in the fields of literature, cinema, and the visual arts, Jean Cocteau was one of the twentieth century’s outstanding creative practitioners. In this collection of brief—often aphoristic—meditations, Jean Cocteau reflects on the fundamental solitariness of the artistic vocation.
As well as offering fascinating insights into Cocteau’s own achievements, Secrets of Beauty is a moving testament to the artist’s need and obligation to pursue an independent path, and to the disjunction between art and “the inflexible everyday world”. Juliet Powys’s translation skilfully captures the wit and subtlety of the original French text—a vital contribution to aesthetic theory that deserves to be read as a significant work of literature in its own right.
Poet, novelist, film producer, librettist, painter, actor, composer…there seemed to be no area where Cocteau couldn’t become a roaring success.…Such were Cocteau’s extraordinary reserves of talent that it’s hard to pick one area in which he was most gifted.
––Charlie Connelly, The New European
One of French cinema’s greatest
and most original directors.
––James S. Williams, Royal Holloway, University of London
WARREN NEIDICH
GLOSSARY OF
COGNITIVE ACTIVISM
(For A Not-So-Distant Future)
COGNITIVE ACTIVISM
(For A Not-So-Distant Future)
Paperback
Out Now
Extent: 368 pages
Trim: 13 x 20 cm
Price: £18 / £10 (ebook)
A repository of vital knowledge and conceptual therapeutics, a toolbox for the willing and the needy.
—Anders Dunker, Los Angeles Review of Books
—Anders Dunker, Los Angeles Review of Books
If you want to talk about what is going on in the field of science, technology, neurology, and about the possibility of ending capitalism, you should read Neidich's book. For the first time someone has done the much-needed job of putting together the pieces, and of giving us a fragmented but consistent picture of the mutation that is changing the world.
—Franco Berardi
—Franco Berardi
An exciting and innovative survey of all manner of topics related to cognition and activism in the twenty-first Century. Neidich demonstrates deep insight into the conditions of our era of cognitive capitalism.
—Victoria Pitts-Taylor
—Victoria Pitts-Taylor
Warren Neidich's attempt in this Glossary of Cognitive Activism has something very similar to the enterprise of the Enlightenment Encyclopedists. The result is amazing: a true handbook of the real alternative culture.
—Yann Moulier Boutang
—Yann Moulier Boutang
Irreplaceable… From ‘accelerationism’ to ‘zeitgeist’ by way of ‘duende’, ‘immaterial labor’, and ‘multitude’, the crucial concepts are all laid out clearly here.
—Barry Schwabsky
—Barry Schwabsky
We live in a world of tremendous connectivity and little collectivity, leaving us witness to the diffuse degradation of personal freedoms. The resurgence of racism and sexism, the power of the global art market, the de-emphasis of theory and the humanities in university curricula, and assaults on privacy such as digital profiling, are just a few examples of the strategy of normalization and governmentalization in the digital economy.
Warren Neidich’s Glossary of Cognitive Activism, published by ERIS in a revised and expanded new edition, updates the epistemological foundations of resistance to this state of affairs. Cognitive capitalism assumes that wealth production is the product of a brain highly attuned to hyper-branded, designed sensibilities. Neidich’s project considers as antidote the role of diverse aesthetic production in the creation of neural maps and network configurations. Ranging in its concerns from ‘deep fakes’ and ‘Chat GPT’ to ‘poetry’ and ‘conceptual art’, the Glossary is a crucial guide to the world we live in, and to the ways in which we might remake it.
WARREN NEIDICH trained in art, architecture, neuroscience, and medicine. He uses neon-light sculptures to create cross-pollinating conceptual text-based works that reflect upon situations at the border zones of art, science, and social justice. Recent awards include Stiftung Kunstfonds NEUSTART KULTUR (2020 and 2021), Hauptstadtkulturfonds (2021), and Katalogförderung des Berliner Senats (2017). His performative and sculptural work Pizzagate Neon (2018), recently on display at the Venice Biennale 2019, analyzed through a large hanging neon sculpture the relations between fake news, the networked attention economy, the evolving technocultural habitus, and the co-evolving architecture of the brain. He was a tutor in the Departments of Visual Art, Computer Science, and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2004–08), as well as recently serving as Professor of Art at Weissensee Academy of Art, Berlin (2016–18). He is founder and Director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (2015–), a theory- intensive postgraduate course. He has been a visiting lecturer at Brown University, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia University, Princeton University, Sorbonne University, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles, among others. His work has been the subject of over 150 magazine and newspaper articles, including in the New York Times, Time Magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Kunstforum International, The Art Newspaper, Smithsonian Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Hyperallergic, Artnet, GQ, Forbes, Vogue IT, Monopol, Performance Art Journal, American Photographer, Time Out, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, and Frieze. His Glossary of Cognitive Activism (For a Not So Distant Future) is now in its fourth edition.
RESISTANCE TO CHRISTIANITY
A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century
A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century
Nothing less than a complete historical account of the development of Christianity.
––Alastair J. Hemmens
This magnificent book chronicles the struggles of the people across many centuries to live free of all masters, to dwell in a world where desire and the divine are one. Vaneigem shows how often those branded as heretics were in revolt against tyranny, but how often also tyrannical Christian impulses contaminated attempts to break free. Essential reading in an age when, once again, the resistance against our gaolers requires a religious as well as a political vocabulary.
––McKenzie Wark
Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century reveals the hidden story behind the modern-day edifice of Christianity. Raoul Vaneigem’s landmark study provides a compelling account of the falsifications and political agendas that shaped what we now know as the canonical Bible and such pillars of Christian doctrine as the Resurrection and the Holy Trinity. It also traces alternative pathways that have been opened up the many individuals and groups that have departed from the Church’s teachings: from the remarkably modern first-century thinker Simon the Magus, to the libertarian mystics of the Middle Ages, to the Jansenists of the seventeenth century. This is, in short, an exceptionally wide-ranging history of the forms of thought and belief that orthodox religion has mischaracterized and suppressed over the course of the centuries.
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.
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.
RAOUL VANEIGEM is a historian and social theorist who was prominently associated with the Situationist International. He is the author of numerous books, including the highly influential The Revolution of Everyday Life. Among other of his works available in English are The Movement of the Free Spirit and A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings.
BILL BROWN has translated hundreds of letters, essays, and books, most of them by members of the Situationist International. He holds a doctorate in American and European literature from the University at Buffalo.
DAVID RIEFF
DESIRE & FATE
OUT SEPTEMBER 2024
Paperback
Publishes May 2024
Extent: 240 pages
Trim: 12.5 x 19.6 cm
Price: £20
“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.
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.
DAVID RIEFF is one of the United States’ leading authorities on global affairs. Renowned for his reporting from conflict zones and on the work of international humanitarian organisations, his writings have shaped public debate on subjects ranging from liberal interventionism to the use and abuse of historical memory. He is also a widely published commentator on contemporary American culture and the author of an acclaimed volume of memoir. His many books include At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir, The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century, and In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies.
RIVER OF BECOMING
The Life and Times of Lucas Samaras
The Life and Times of Lucas Samaras
Paperback
Extent: 362 pages
Trim: 15.2 x 22.9 cm
ISBN: 9781912475582
Price: £30 / £10 (ebook)
A tour de force of narcissism and inventive art . . .
Art and life seamlessly integrate in perpetual metamorphic motion.
––Donald Kuspit
A master of the self-portrait form.
––NEW YORK TIMES
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.
Co-published with Greece in USA under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture.
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.
Co-published with Greece in USA under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture.
NO POLITICS BUT CLASS POLITICS
Paperback
Extent: 392 pages
Trim: 15.2 x 22.9 cm
ISBN: 9781912475575
Price: £20 / £10 (ebook)
Adolph Reed Jr. is the towering radical theorist of American democracy of his generation.
—Cornel West
Walter Benn Michaels is cunning, brilliant, acutely suggestive, exhilarating to read.
—Eric Lott
Wokelords and anti-racist liberals will be frustrated, enraged, and defeated. This book pushes us closer towards the uncompromising, bare-knuckled anti-capitalist movement we so desperately need.
—Cedric Johnson
An exhilarating journey that swaps the orthodoxies of contemporary progressive culture for a class politics rooted in universalism.
—James Bloodworth
Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels have been among the clearest voices critiquing the dominant race reductionism in American intellectual life and proposing a real egalitarian alternative.
—Bhaskar Sunkara
Anyone interested in the politics of race and class must push aside the dogma of identity and grapple with what Reed and Michaels have been arguing for decades.
—Jodi Dean
Denouncing racism and celebrating diversity have become central mainstays of progressive politics: for many on the left, social justice consists of equitable distribution of wealth, power, and esteem among racial groups. But as Adolph Reed, Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels argue in this groundbreaking collection of essays, the emphasis seems to be tragically misplaced. Not only does a fixation with racial disparities distract from the pervasive influence of class—it actually legitimises 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.
THOMAS SCHLESSER
Translated by Charles Penwarden
Translated by Charles Penwarden
LUMINOUS LIVES
A biography of Anna-Eva Bergman
A biography of Anna-Eva Bergman
Cloth-bound hardback
Extent: 486 pages
Trim 14.6 x 22.2 cm
113 colour illustrations
Price: £30
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 remarkable 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 the creator of these magnificent works in all the complexity of her character and the dramatic circumstances of her life.
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 remarkable 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 the creator of these magnificent works in all the complexity of her character and the dramatic circumstances of her life.
THOMAS SCHLESSER is Director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation and a professor at the École Polytechnique in Paris.
DO NOT RESUSCITATE
The Life and Afterlife
of Maurice Saatchi
The Life and Afterlife
of Maurice Saatchi
Hardback with jacket
Extent: 128 pages
Trim: 12.9 x 19.8 cm
ISBN: 9781912475599
Price: £20
Deeply moving.
—Sir David Hare
I relished every page.
—Sir Elton John
Beautiful and profound.
—The Dean of Westminster
An act of enduring and boundless love.
—Michael Dobbs
A work of loss, love, and distress.
—Jon Snow
Surreal and insightful.
—John Major
Maurice Saatchi is dead.
He is standing in front of the Gates of Heaven. Arrival halls worse than Heathrow. 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.
He is standing in front of the Gates of Heaven. Arrival halls worse than Heathrow. 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.
ONLY TOO MUCH IS ENOUGH
Francis Bacon in his own words
Francis Bacon in his own words
Flapped paperback
Extent: 80 pages
Trim: 13 x 23 cm
ISBN: 9781912475568
Price: £13
Peppiatt offers a window into the experiences and emotional intelligence of this great artist.
—NEW STATESMAN
Francis Bacon and Michael Peppiatt were close friends for over thirty years. As Peppiatt, the editor of this volume, tells us in his illuminating Introduction, the two would regularly embark on night-time “odysseys around London and Paris”, “ordering extravagant vintages, raising toasts to all and sundry, talking and laughing immoderately.”
Francis Bacon’s conversation was witty, provocative, and profound. In this volume, his long-time friend, curator, chronicler, and biographer has gathered Bacon’s most memorable aphorisms, evoking both the force of the artist’s personality and the range of his interests.
These sayings, assembled for the first time in Only Too Much Is Enough, form a brilliant accompaniment to Bacon’s works, conveying not only a sceptical and sometimes disquieting outlook on human relationships, but also keen insights into his creative process.
Francis Bacon’s conversation was witty, provocative, and profound. In this volume, his long-time friend, curator, chronicler, and biographer has gathered Bacon’s most memorable aphorisms, evoking both the force of the artist’s personality and the range of his interests.
These sayings, assembled for the first time in Only Too Much Is Enough, form a brilliant accompaniment to Bacon’s works, conveying not only a sceptical and sometimes disquieting outlook on human relationships, but also keen insights into his creative process.
WHERE ARE WE NOW?
The Epidemic as Politics
The Epidemic as Politics
SECOND UPDATED EDITION
Paperback
Extent: 124 pages
Trim: 13.8 x 22 cm
ISBN: 9781912475353
Price: £17 / £10 (ebook)
An on-the-spot study of the link between power and knowledge.
––Christopher Caldwell, NEW YORK TIMES
Agamben is right that our rulers will use every opportunity to consolidate their power, especially in times of crisis. That coronavirus is being exploited to strengthen mass-surveillance infrastructure is no secret.
––Marco D’Eramo, NEW LEFT REVIEW
A fascinating intervention on the encroaching state of biosecurity we are witnessing before our very eyes.
––Colby Dickinson
In this volume, the renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has collected all of his fierce, passionate, and deeply personal interventions regarding the current health emergency.
Alongside and beyond accusations, these texts variously reflect upon the great transformation affecting Western democracies. In the name of biosecurity and health, the model of bourgeois democracy—together with its rights, parliaments, and constitutions—is everywhere surrendering to a new despotism where citizens seem to accept unprecedented limitations to their freedoms.
This leads to the urgency of the volume’s title: Where Are We Now? For how long will we accept living in a constantly extended state of exception, the end of which remains impossible to see?
TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS
Paperback
Extent: 240 pages
Trim: 12.4x19.5cm
ISBN: 9781912475315
Price: £20
Benda’s book is the great twentieth-century defense of intellectual integrity. It has become extraordinarily timely again at a moment when social criticism often routes itself through the particular loyalties of racial, religious, and national identity.
––David Bromwich
Certain books never live up to their memorable titles. Others do, but not in the way their authors might have anticipated. Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals, an essential intervention in twentieth-century debates about intellectual responsibility, is the second sort of book. Cast into the agitated waters of European politics between the two world wars, it still floats ashore every decade or so, attracting readers with its stirring call to the independent life of the mind, free from the lures of power and authority. It is essential reading.
Ever since the book’s publication in 1927 its argument has been taken up by writers of very different political stripes in very different historical circumstances. In the 1930s, communist intellectuals denounced their fascist counterparts as traitors to the truth; liberals levied the same charge against communists and fellow travelers during the Cold War, only to find themselves then put in the dock by progressives and neoconservatives and now populists. Treason is one of those books that serve both as a lens for discerning the present and a mirror reflecting the image of those who appeal to it. This welcome new edition of the work offers an opportunity to look without and within with fresher eyes.–MARK LILLA
From the book’s Introduction.
Click on the image to read the full text:
Julien Benda, (c) Tablet Magazine
In an era when intellectual and artistic life is increasingly being distorted by political dogmatism, Julian 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.
Sometimes a text reaches out from the past and grabs the present by the throat. Julien Benda has much to say to our time of anger and division, a time when it is easy to imagine the end of everything but nearly impossible to imagine how things might change let alone improve. Treason of the Intellectuals remains inspiring and invigorating, a call for independence and the creation of an alternative to our wholly suffocating and mind-deadening political culture. Let this book become a companion to you and a tonic for the turmoil.
––Jessa Crispin
AGE OF ANXIETY
French paperback
Extent: 162 pages
Trim: 12.5 x 19.5 cm
ISBN: 9781912475148
Price: £13 / £10 (ebook)
Greece’s pre-eminent sociologist.
—Helena Smith, THE GUARDIAN
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.
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.
CONSTANTINE TSOUCALAS has published extensively in Greek, French, German and English, and has written for various international magazines and journals. Trained in law and sociology but fluent in the full theoretical range of the social sciences and humanities (philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, epistemology, and aesthetics), he has worked at the Athens Centre for Social Research and at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris and, from 1985, Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Athens. He currently is an Alexander S. Onassis fellow and a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Columbia and Princeton.
ON DEPICTION
Selected Writings on Art
Selected Writings on Art
Paperback
Extent: 304 pages
Trim 14.4 x 22 cm
46 black & white illustrations
Price: £25 / £10 (ebook)
Throughout his whole development I have never ceased to admire the acuteness of his vision and his faultless insight into the art of the past.
—Samuel Beckett
Avigdor Arikha was one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. He was born in Romania to German-speaking Romanian Jewish parents and spent most of his life in Paris. A talented child, he started drawing early on. During the Second World War, he was deported to a concentration camp in the Ukraine, where he drew the horrors he witnessed. These drawings saved his life. During the 1950s, he established himself in Paris and was enjoying a successful career as an abstract painter. In 1965, a Caravaggio exhibition prompted him to convert to drawing from life. He stopped using colour until 1973, when he started again to paint. He worked with a religious, almost war-like, intensity until his death.
Arikha was also an erudite and passionate scholar, endowed with a deep understanding of the history of art and its techniques, well-versed in world history and fascinated by science. He wrote many essays and curated important exhibitions of masters such as Poussin, Velázquez and Ingres.
In this collection of essays that he wrote between 1965 and 1994, Arikha expounds on art and artists (Mantegna, Velázquez, Poussin, David, Ingres, Degas, Matisse, and more), technique, seeing, and the state of culture in his day, which, one could argue, is no more hopeful today—almost thirty years later—than it was then.
Arikha was also an erudite and passionate scholar, endowed with a deep understanding of the history of art and its techniques, well-versed in world history and fascinated by science. He wrote many essays and curated important exhibitions of masters such as Poussin, Velázquez and Ingres.
In this collection of essays that he wrote between 1965 and 1994, Arikha expounds on art and artists (Mantegna, Velázquez, Poussin, David, Ingres, Degas, Matisse, and more), technique, seeing, and the state of culture in his day, which, one could argue, is no more hopeful today—almost thirty years later—than it was then.
A VISION FOR EUROPE 2020
Nothing But an Alternative
Nothing But an Alternative
Flapped paperback
Extent: 376 pages
Trim: 17 x 24 cm
ISBN: 9781912475285
Price: £20 / £10 (ebook)
A book that gives hope and provides solutions to break the doom loop. A must-read for all citizens who do not want to abandon Europe to the neoliberals and the nationalists.
—Thomas Picketty
Now more than ever, it is tempting to believe that there is no alternative to financialised capitalism. This collection of rigorous policy proposals, lucid analysis, and courageous creative thinking breaks free of this doctrine to chart a course toward a democratic, liberated, social Europe.
—Paul Mason
An international all-star cast of thinkers, artists, and policy makers joins forces for a transparent, united, democratic Europe.
The 2020 Edition features contributions by Kate Aronoff, Bill McKibben, Evgeny Morozov, Jerome Roos, and more.
The European Union was an exceptional achievement. It brought together and in peace peoples speaking different languages and submersed in different cultures, proving that it was possible to create a shared framework of human rights across a continent that was not long ago tormented by murderous chauvinism, racism, and barbarity. It could have been the proverbial Beacon on the Hill, showing the world how peace and solidarity may be snatched from the jaws of age-old conflict and bigotry.
But things turned out differently. Today, a common bureaucracy and a common currency divide Europeans who were beginning to unite despite their different languages and cultures. A confederacy of myopic politicians, economically naïve officials, and financially incompetent ‘experts’ submit slavishly to the edicts of financial and industrial conglomerates, alienating people and stirring up a dangerous anti-European backlash. Proud peoples are being turned against each other. Nationalism, extremism and racism are being re-awakened.
With contributions from some of the world’s foremost thinkers, artists and politicians covering the full spectrum of concerns for the future of the Union, this volume presents realistic and viable alternatives to the mainstream barrage of dreadful prospects—a true vision for Europe.
The 2020 Edition features contributions by Kate Aronoff, Bill McKibben, Evgeny Morozov, Jerome Roos, and more.
The European Union was an exceptional achievement. It brought together and in peace peoples speaking different languages and submersed in different cultures, proving that it was possible to create a shared framework of human rights across a continent that was not long ago tormented by murderous chauvinism, racism, and barbarity. It could have been the proverbial Beacon on the Hill, showing the world how peace and solidarity may be snatched from the jaws of age-old conflict and bigotry.
But things turned out differently. Today, a common bureaucracy and a common currency divide Europeans who were beginning to unite despite their different languages and cultures. A confederacy of myopic politicians, economically naïve officials, and financially incompetent ‘experts’ submit slavishly to the edicts of financial and industrial conglomerates, alienating people and stirring up a dangerous anti-European backlash. Proud peoples are being turned against each other. Nationalism, extremism and racism are being re-awakened.
With contributions from some of the world’s foremost thinkers, artists and politicians covering the full spectrum of concerns for the future of the Union, this volume presents realistic and viable alternatives to the mainstream barrage of dreadful prospects—a true vision for Europe.
This volume questions the notion of the EU being a private members club and offers, instead, a vision: one that supersedes the utopia-turned-realism that has been zombied into a set of nationalistic and intellectually limited concerns and turns it into a collaborative space and culture of commons.
—Markus Miessen
An incredibly timely book and a very much needed initiative. The progressives all around the world need to talk, join forces, network, exchange ideas and create a community of knowledge that will enable us, the people, to create a better and fairer future for all.
—Frank Barat
What sort of Europe do we want? That of the failed neoliberal centre in service to corporate power? That of the creeping fascists peddling nationalism and racism? Or the Europe of working people fighting for equality, democracy, peace, and sustainability? This superb collection of short essays offers a compelling vision of that progressive alternative.
—Neil Faulkner
CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS et al
SOCIALISME OU BARBARIE
An Anthology
An Anthology
Paperback
Extent: 488 pages
Trim: 15.5 x. 23.5 cm
ISBN: 9781912475131
Price: £20
The objective of politics is not happiness but freedom; autonomy is freedom understood not in the inherited, metaphysical sense, but as effective, humanly feasible, lucid and reflective positing of the rules of individual and collective activity.
––Cornelius Castoriadis
Socialisme ou Barbarie (1948–67) was a revolutionary group whose 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.
