Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In Occupy, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors' lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolat...

This publication is being released to coincide with the retrospective of the British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara at Mudam Luxembourg. It brings together a range of authors who explore Fujiwara's central themes and methods from diverse perspectives. The essays examine the structures underlying his works through the lens of topics such as psychoanalysis, iconography, branding, and marketing. In doing so, they also reflect on the conditions of artistic life and work in an increasingly medi...

We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police brutality, and from graphic horror films to transgressive artworks, many of the images in our media culture might strike us as unsuitable for viewing. Yet what does it mean to proclaim something “unwatchable”: disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible?With over 50 original essays by leadin...

The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author delivers a collection of essays that serve as the perfect "antidote to mansplaining" ( The Stranger).In her comic, scathing essay "Men Explain Things to Me," Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing...

A compelling set of interviews on our changing and turbulent times at the dawn of the twenty-first century with one of the world's foremost thinkers."Sitting down and talking to Noam Chomsky about current affairs has to be one of the most illuminating experiences going. But what if you can't always think of the best questions? Not to worry: David Barsamian's interviews with Chomsky consistently ask penetrating and provocative questions. If you're familiar w...

In their international bestseller Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri presented a grand unified vision of a world in which the old forms of imperialism are no longer effective. But what of Empire in an age of “American empire”? Has fear become our permanent condition and democracy an impossible dream? Such pessimism is profoundly mistaken, the authors argue. Empire, by interconnecting more areas of life, is actually creating the possibility for a new kind of democracy,...

In Ethnicity, Inc. anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff analyze a new moment in the history of human identity: its rampant commodification. Through a wide-ranging exploration of the changing relationship between culture and the market, they address a pressing question: Wherein lies the future of ethnicity?Their account begins in South Africa, with the incorporation of an ethno-business in venture capital by a group of traditional African chiefs. But their horizons are...

Billions of dollars were hastily poured into the global banking system in a frantic attempt at financial stabilisation. So why has it not been possible to bring the same forces to bear in addressing world poverty and environmental crisis? In this take-no-prisoners analysis, Slavoj Zizek frames the moral failures of the modern world in terms of the epoch-making events of the first decade of this century. What he finds is the old one-two punch of history: the jab of tragedy, the right hook o...

Exploring a number of trends in our popular culture, Andrew Potter argues that our pursuit of the authentic is fraught with irony and self-defeat.Thought provoking and revelatory, The Authenticity Hoax exposes how the search for the "true" and "real" is rooted in a society obsessed with individual elitists suckered into believing that their lifestyles are the only genuine ones in a fake world. Manipulated by the inescapable consumerism and sound bi...

"We are living through the endtimes of the civilizing mission. The ineffectual International Criminal Court and its disastrous first prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, along with the failure in Syria of the Responsibility to Protect are the latest pieces of evidence not of transient misfortunes but of fatal structural defects in international humanism. Whether it is the increase in deadly attacks on aid workers, the torture and 'disappearing' of al-Qaeda suspects by American officials, the fl...

Maverick philosopher Slavoj Zizek returns to explore today's ideological, political and economic battles—and asks whether radical change is possibleIn these troubled times, even the most pessimistic diagnosis of our future ends with an uplifting hint that things might not be as bad as all that, that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yet, argues Slavoj Zizek, it is only when we have admitted to ourselves that our situation is completely hopel...

The internationally renowned theorist contends that the sun is setting on the American empire in this "lucid, informed, and insightful" account ( The New York Times).The United States currently finds itself [a] superpower that lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and few respect, and a nation drifting dangerously amidst a global chaos it cannot control.The United States in decline? Its admirers and detractors alike claim the opp...