For Theory is an invitation to review the impact of neoliberalization on critical thinking and a call to recover the momentum of theoretical production capable of sustaining better analyses of the conjuncture for an emancipatory strategy. Relying on the tradition of Althusserian studies, the book discusses the political, technocratic, neo-anarchist and reformist drifts of Latin American leftist thought and thus raises the need to advance in a materialistic and pluralistic conceptualization of historical time and to develop the category of overdetermination. It does so by focusing on the theory of reproduction and in a complex consideration of the concept of class struggle, in order to dispute the future with the dominant ideology that imposes a regime of presentist temporality, discouraging any emancipatory imagination of the future.

For Theory is an invitation to review the impact of neoliberalization on critical thinking and a call to recover the momentum of theoretical production capable of sustaining better analyses of the conjuncture for an emancipatory strategy. Relying on the tradition of Althusserian studies, the book discusses the political, technocratic, neo-anarchist and reformist drifts of Latin American leftist thought and thus raises the need to advance in a materialistic and pluralistic conceptualization of historical time and to develop the category of overdetermination. It does so by focusing on the theory of reproduction and in a complex consideration of the concept of class struggle, in order to dispute the future with the dominant ideology that imposes a regime of presentist temporality, discouraging any emancipatory imagination of the future.

Foucault's thought finds innumerable applications across the social sciences, from studies in the social aspects of the medical practices and criminal sociology to juridical and economic sciences. Owing to their philosophical ramifications, his ideas have also impacted the spheres of literary studies, ethics, political thought, and "critical ontology." Few thinkers have left such an influence across such a diverse range of studies. Contributors attempt to pay homage to that diversity by presenting a multidisciplinary series of analyses dedicated to the question of "power today." Drawn from a number of papers presented at an international conference entitled "Michel Foucault and social Control: conducted at Maison de la culture Cote-des-Neiges in Montreal on May 8-10, 2004 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Foucault's death, the essays that comprise this volume address the issue at both a theoretical level and as it pertains to specific fields of practice. In addition to paying tribute to Foucault's achievements and situating his thought within the French and larger European context from which it emerged, these essays also re-evaluate the relevance of Foucault's ideas for understanding contemporary conditions. This book is suited for a broad academic audience in the humanities and Social Sciences, especially philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies.

Foucault's thought finds innumerable applications across the social sciences, from studies in the social aspects of the medical practices and criminal sociology to juridical and economic sciences. Owing to their philosophical ramifications, his ideas have also impacted the spheres of literary studies, ethics, political thought, and 'critical ontology.' Few thinkers have left such an influence across such a diverse range of studies. Contributors attempt to pay homage to that diversity by presenting a multidisciplinary series of analyses dedicated to the question of 'power today.' Drawn from a number of papers presented at an international conference entitled 'Michel Foucault and social Control: conducted at Maison de la culture CTte-des-Neiges in Montreal on May 8-10, 2004 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Foucault's death, the essays that comprise this volume address the issue at both a theoretical level and as it pertains to specific fields of practice. In addition to paying tribute to Foucault's achievements and situating his thought within the French and larger European context from which it emerged, these essays also re-evaluate the relevance of Foucault's ideas for understanding contemporary conditions. This book is suited for a broad academic audience in the humanities and Social Sciences, especially philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies.

"The Other Adam Smith" represents the next wave of critical thinking about the still under-examined work of this paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker. Not simply another book about Adam Smith, it allows and even necessitates his inclusion in the realm of theory in the broadest sense. Moving beyond his usual economic and moral philosophical texts, Mike Hill and Warren Montag take seriously Smith's entire corpus, his writing on knowledge, affect, sociability and government, and political economy, as constituting a comprehensive--though highly contestable--system of thought. We meet not just Smith the economist, but Smith the philosopher, Smith the literary critic, Smith the historian, and Smith the anthropologist. Placed in relation to key thinkers such as Hume, Lord Kames, Fielding, Hayek, Von Mises, and Agamben, this other Adam Smith, far from being localized in the history of eighteenth-century economic thought or ideas, stands at the center of the most vibrant and contentious debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

"The Other Adam Smith" represents the next wave of critical thinking about the still under-examined work of this paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker. Not simply another book about Adam Smith, it allows and even necessitates his inclusion in the realm of theory in the broadest sense. Moving beyond his usual economic and moral philosophical texts, Mike Hill and Warren Montag take seriously Smith's entire corpus, his writing on knowledge, affect, sociability and government, and political economy, as constituting a comprehensive--though highly contestable--system of thought. We meet not just Smith the economist, but Smith the philosopher, Smith the literary critic, Smith the historian, and Smith the anthropologist. Placed in relation to key thinkers such as Hume, Lord Kames, Fielding, Hayek, Von Mises, and Agamben, this other Adam Smith, far from being localized in the history of eighteenth-century economic thought or ideas, stands at the center of the most vibrant and contentious debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid- eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume's contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.

This collection explores Balibar's rethinking of the connections between subjection and subjectivity by tracing the genealogies of these concepts in their discursive history. The 12 essays provide an overview of Balibar's work after his collaboration with Althusser. They explain and expand his framework; in particular, by restoring Arabic and Islamic thought to the conversation on the citizen subject. The collection includes two previously untranslated essays by Balibar himself on Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes.

This collection explores Balibar's rethinking of the connections between subjection and subjectivity by tracing the genealogies of these concepts in their discursive history. The 12 essays provide an overview of Balibar's work after his collaboration with Althusser. They explain and expand his framework; in particular, by restoring Arabic and Islamic thought to the conversation on the citizen subject. The collection includes two previously untranslated essays by Balibar himself on Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes.

This collection revisits A Theory of Literary Production (1966) to show how Pierre Macherey's remarkable-and still provocative-early work can contribute to contemporary discussions about the act of reading and the politics of formal analysis. Across a series of historically and philosophically contextualized readings, the volume's contributors interrogate Macherey's work on a range of pressing issues, including the development of a theory of reading and criticism, the relationship between the spoken and the unspoken, the labor of poetic determination and of literature's resistance to ideological context, the literary relevance of a Spinozist materialism, the process of racial subjectification and the ontology of Blackness, and a theorization of the textual surface. Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production also includes three new texts by Macherey, presented here in English for the first time: his postface to the revised French edition of A Theory of Literary Production; "Reading Althusser," in which Macherey analyzes the concept of symptomatic reading; and a comprehensive interview in which Macherey reflects on the historical conditions of his early work, the long arc of his career at the intersection of philosophy and literature, and the ongoing importance of Louis Althusser's thought. Recent translations of Macherey's work into English have introduced new readers to the critic's enduring power and originality. Timely in its questions and teeming with fresh insights, Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production demonstrates the depths to which his work resonates, now more than ever.

Major theorists discuss Derrida's most political work and Derrida responds. Fredric Jameson, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton, Pierre Macherey and others engage in a debate on Marx with Jacques Derrida With the publication of Specters of Marx in 1993, Jacques Derrida redeemed a longstanding pledge to confront Marx's texts directly and in detail. His characteristically bravura presentation provided a provocative re-reading of the classics in the Western tradition and posed a series of challenges to Marxism. In a timely intervention in one of today's most vital theoretical debates, the contributors to Ghostly Demarcations respond to the distinctive program projected by Specters of Marx, The volume features sympathetic meditations on the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction by Fredric Jameson, Werner Hamacher, Antonio Negri, Warren Montag, and Rastko Mcnik, brief polemical reviews by Terry Eagleton and Pierre Macherey, and sustained political critiques by Tom Lewis and Aijaz Ahmad. The volume concludes with Derrida's reply to his critics in which he sharpens his views about the vexed relationship between Marxism and deconstruction. 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

In this study, the author situates the works of Jonathan Swift in relation to the ideological and political currents of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. His analysis aims to contribute both to an understanding of a seminal figure in English literature, and to the study of the dominant political and religious ideologies of the early capitalist state.

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid- eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume's contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.

To see the presence of Spinoza, Louis Althusser once quipped, "one must at least have heard of him". The essays collected in this volume suggest that what applies to Althusser applies to his whole generation -- that Spinoza is an unsuspected but very real presence in the work of contemporary philosophers from Deleuze and Lacan to Foucault and Derrida.

These essays, most of them appearing in English for the first time, establish Spinoza's rightful role in the development and direction of contemporary continental philosophy. The volume should interest not only the growing group of scholars attracted to Spinoza's thought on ethics, politics, and subjectivity, but also theorists in a variety of fields who have not yet understood how their work can productively engage Spinoza.

Althusser and His Contemporaries alters and expands understanding of Louis Althusser and French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of pages of previously unpublished work from different periods of Althusser's career have been made available in French since his death in 1990. Based on meticulous study of the philosopher's posthumous publications, as well as his unpublished manuscripts, lecture notes, letters, and marginalia, Warren Montag provides a thoroughgoing reevaluation of Althusser's philosophical project. Montag shows that the theorist was intensely engaged with the work of his contemporaries, particularly Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan. Examining Althusser's philosophy as a series of encounters with his peers' thought, Montag contends that Althusser's major philosophical confrontations revolved around three themes: structure, subject, and beginnings and endings. Reading Althusser reading his contemporaries, Montag sheds new light on structuralism, poststructuralism, and the extraordinary moment of French thought in the 1960s and 1970s.