In a series of televised interviews in spring 2022, Bruno Latour explained, in clear and straightforward terms, how humans have changed the planet and why environmental disasters are an intrinsic part of modern life.  We have now come to realize that all life depends on a thin skin of our planet that is only few kilometres thick – what scientists call the ‘critical zone’.  Our capacity to continue to live on a planet we are transforming is now at risk and if we wish to survive as a species, we must put an end to the mechanisms of destruction, rethink our connection to living beings and face head-on the confrontation between the extractivists who are exploiting the Earth’s resources and the ecologists.  This poignant reflection on the greatest challenge of our time is also an opportunity for Latour to explain the underlying thread that guided his work throughout his career, from his pathbreaking research on the social construction of scientific knowledge to his last writings on the Anthropocene.

In a series of televised interviews in spring 2022, Bruno Latour explained, in clear and straightforward terms, how humans have changed the planet and why environmental disasters are an intrinsic part of modern life.  We have now come to realize that all life depends on a thin skin of our planet that is only few kilometres thick – what scientists call the ‘critical zone’.  Our capacity to continue to live on a planet we are transforming is now at risk and if we wish to survive as a species, we must put an end to the mechanisms of destruction, rethink our connection to living beings and face head-on the confrontation between the extractivists who are exploiting the Earth’s resources and the ecologists.  This poignant reflection on the greatest challenge of our time is also an opportunity for Latour to explain the underlying thread that guided his work throughout his career, from his pathbreaking research on the social construction of scientific knowledge to his last writings on the Anthropocene.

'There's something of everything there, the best and the worst, the vulgar and the sublime, flowers, muck, tears, laughter, the river of life itself' Pascal Rougon has served as a doctor in the rural French town of Plassans for thirty years. He lives a quiet life with his faithful servant Martine and young niece Clotilde. Pascal is a man of science, striving to find the ultimate cure for all diseases. This puts him at odds with his niece, who is horrified by his denial of religious faith. Clotilde also distrusts Pascal's lifelong ambition to create a family tree on scientific principles, based upon his theories of heredity. Tensions in the household are fuelled by Pascal's scheming mother, Felicite, as the final episode in the great Rougon-Macquart saga plays out. Dr Pascal is the passionate conclusion to Zola's twenty-novel sequence, and the most eloquent expression of the ideas on heredity and human progress that have underpinned it. Human relations are at its heart, as Pascal and Clotilde are bound ever closer by ties of family and love.

'You're 82 years old. You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable' - so begins Andre Gorz's 'open love letter' to the woman he has lived with for 58 years and who lies dying next to him.

As one of France's leading post-war philosophers, Andre Gorz wrote many influential books, but nothing he wrote will be read as widely or remembered as long as this simple, passionate, beautiful letter to his dying wife.

In a bittersweet postscript a year after Letter to D was published, a note pinned to the door for the cleaning lady marked the final chapter in an extraordinary love story. Andre Gorz and his terminally ill wife, Dorine, were found lying peacefully side by side, having taken their lives together. They simply could not live without one another.

An international bestseller, "Letter to D" is the ultimate love story - and all the more poignant because it's true.

Read the masterful story of romance and revolution behind the hit BBC TV series. Les Miserables is a novel peopled by colourful characters from the nineteenth-century Parisian underworld; the street children, the prostitutes and the criminals. In telling the story of escaped convict Jean Valjean, and his efforts to reform his ways and care for the little orphan girl he rescues from a life of cruelty, Victor Hugo drew attention to the plight of the poor and oppressed. Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, Les Miserables is one of the greatest stories ever told. NOW A MAJOR BBC TV ADAPTATION STARRING DOMINIC WEST, OLIVIA COLEMAN AND DAVID OYELOWO 'There are plenty of translations of this extensive, exuberant novel that cut out anything superfluous. But God is in the detail...This is the one to read' Jeanette Winterson

Therapeutic deep play has the capacity for children to express deep emotions, overcome seemingly insurmountable issues and resolve serious problems. Working with children in this profound way, therapists are able to not only eliminate symptoms, but to change the very structure of how children live with themselves, their defense and belief systems. The contributors to this book all work deeply, allowing children to take risks in a safe environment, and become fully absorbed in physical play. Chapters include play with deep sandboxes, clay, water, and various objects, and look at a range of pertinent case studies to demonstrate the therapeutic techniques in practice, alongside the theoretical concepts in which they are grounded. A new theoretical approach is established that takes from psychoanalysis as well as neuroscience and behaviourism, and offers a depth psychology approach in the treatment of children. This will be a valuable resource for anyone working therapeutically with children through play, including play therapists, psychotherapists, psychologists, arts therapists, counsellors, social workers and family therapists.

Paul Virilio is one of contemporary continental thought's most original and provocative critical voices. His vision of the impact of modern technology on the contemporary global condition is powerful and disturbing, ranging over art, architecture, science, politics, visual culture and warfare. In Art and Fear, Virilio traces the twin development of art and science over the 20th century. In his provocative vision, art and science vie with each other for the destruction of the human form as we know it. This is a radical take on the state of art for a post-human and post-historical world. In Art as Far as the Eye Can See Virilio considers the effects that the technological advances of the 20th century have had on art, aesthetics and politics and looks at the way in which these technologies alienate us from our physical environment.

Paul Virilio puts art back where it matters - at the centre of politics. Art used to be an engagement between artist and materials. But in our new media world art has changed, its very materials have changed and have become technologized. This change reflects a broader social shift. Speed and politics - what Virilio defined as the key characteristics of the twentieth century - have been transformed in the twenty-first century to speed and mass culture. And the defining characteristic of mass culture today is panic. This induced panic relies on a new, all-seeing technology. And the first casualty of this is the human response. What we are losing is the very human 'art of seeing', one individual's engagement with another or with an event, be that political or artistic. What we are losing is our sense of the aesthetic. Where art used to talk of the aesthetics of disappearance, it must now confront the disappearance of the aesthetic.

"Art as Far as the Eye Can See" puts art back where it matters -- at the center of politics. Art used to be an engagement between artist and materials but it has now become technologized. Its materials have become light rather than matter. In the 21st Century the new battleground is art as light versus art as matter. Virilio argues that this change reflects how speed and politics - the defining characteristics of the 20th Century - have been transformed in the 21st Century to speed and mass culture. Politics has been replaced with mass culture...and the defining characteristic of mass culture today is cold panic. The same panic which has used terrorism to derail democracy has hijacked the whole art enterprise. This panic is reliant on audio-visual technology to create a new all-seeing, panoptic politics. And the first casualty of this politics is "the art of seeing." Where art used to talk of the aesthetics of disappearance, it must now confront the disappearance of the aesthetic. In the 21st Century, the new battleground is art as light versus art as matter.

Film World brings together key interviews with cinema's leading directors. The directors chosen represent many of the most influential film-makers of the last 50 years. All have been selected because of their cinematic vision, because they have a particular way of seeing the world and of filming it. All have created a body of work which is both hugely popular and critically acclaimed. This truly global range of directors hails from Australia, Britain, China and Hong Kong, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, North America, Poland, and Russia. Together, these illuminating interviews reveal how these visionary directors create images which speak to audiences the world over. The interviews are with: Bernardo Bertolucci, John Boorman, Robert Bresson, Jane Campion, John Cassavetes, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Werner Herzog, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wei, Aki Kaurismaki, Abbas Kiarostami, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Takeshi Kitano, Im Kwon-taek, Mike Leigh, Manoel de Oliveira, Satyajit Ray, Martin Scorsese, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars von Trier, Zhang Yimou

This unique book triggers the imagination. With a combination of striking images and powerful words it leads the reader into visualizations that enable relaxation, release and insights that improve ones sense of well-being. If you usually struggle with meditation, try this!

City of Panic takes the reader on a journey across the airy boulevards of Paris and into the crypt of its Metro. For Virilio, whose sense of cities was formed by earlier wars, Paris is both the City of Light and the City of Panic. Written in the shadow of war, City of Panic argues that cities everywhere have been the dedicated target of political and technological terror throughout the 20th century. The wanton erasure of the past, the construction of identikit places, the proliferation of gated-communities, the ever-widening net of surveillance, the privatisation of what was public ...Now every metropolis is a war zone and every metropolis is the same. In this globalized and militarized everywhere, all citizens are becoming one citizen - saturated, standardized and synchronized - ever-more reliant on a media fabricating a world of fear. For the panic of the 21st century is simply the final phase of the pincer movement. Place-less, media-fed, panic-struck - welcome to the desert of the real.

A passionate critique of information technology and the global media.
"One day the day will come when the day will not come." Bleak, but passionately political in its analysis of the social destruction wrought by modern technologies of communication anc surveillance "Open Sky" is Paul Virilio's most far-reaching and radical book. Deepening and extending his earlier work, he explores the growing danger of what he calls a "generalized accident," provoked by the breakdown of our collective and individual relation to time, space and movement in the contex of global electronic media. But this is not merely a lucid and disturbing lament for the loss of real geographical spaces, distance, intimacy or democracy. "Open Sky" is also a call for revolt--against the insidious and accelerating manipulation of perception by the electronic media and repressive political power, against the tyranny of "real time," and against the infantilism of cyberhype. Paul Virillo makes a powerful case for a new ethics of perception, and a new ecology, one which will not only strive to protect the natural world from pollution and destruction, but will also combat the devastation of urban communities by proliferating technologies of control and virtuality.
"Verso's beautifully designed "Radical Thinkers" series, which brings together seminal works by leading left-wing intellectuals, is a sophisticated blend of theory and thought. The authors whose writings are included in the series have worked tirelessly to expose the mechanisms by which culture and knowledge are manufactured, managed and controlled."--Ziauddin Sardar, "New Statesman"

From Noah's Ark to Diller + Scofidio's "Blur" Building, a distinguished art historian maps new ways to think about architecture's origin and development. Trained as an art historian but viewing architecture from the perspective of a "displaced philosopher," Hubert Damisch in these essays offers a meticulous parsing of language and structure to "think architecture in a different key," as Anthony Vidler puts it in his introduction. Drawn to architecture because it provides "an open series of structural models," Damisch examines the origin of architecture and then its structural development from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. He leads the reader from Jean-Francois Blondel to Eugene Viollet-le-Duc to Mies van der Rohe to Diller + Scofidio, with stops along the way at the Temple of Jerusalem, Vitruvius's De Architectura, and the Louvre. In the title essay, Damisch moves easily from Diderot's Encylopedie to Noah's Ark (discussing the provisioning, access, floor plan) to the Pan American Building to Le Corbusier to Ground Zero. Noah's Ark marks the origin of construction, and thus of architecture itself. Diderot's Encylopedie entry on architecture followed his entry on Noah's Ark; architecture could only find its way after the Flood. In these thirteen essays, written over a span of forty years, Damisch takes on other histories and theories of architecture to trace a unique trajectory of architectural structure and thought. The essays are, as Vidler says, "a set of exercises" in thinking about architecture.

Film World brings together key interviews with cinema's leading directors. The directors chosen represent many of the most influential film-makers of the last 50 years. All have been selected because of their cinematic vision, because they have a particular way of seeing the world and of filming it. All have created a body of work which is both hugely popular and critically acclaimed. This truly global range of directors hails from Australia, Britain, China and Hong Kong, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, North America, Poland, and Russia. Together, these illuminating interviews reveal how these visionary directors create images which speak to audiences the world over. The interviews are with: Bernardo Bertolucci, John Boorman, Robert Bresson, Jane Campion, John Cassavetes, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Werner Herzog, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wei, Aki Kaurismaki, Abbas Kiarostami, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Takeshi Kitano, Im Kwon-taek, Mike Leigh, Manoel de Oliveira, Satyajit Ray, Martin Scorsese, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars von Trier, Zhang Yimou