Alain Badiou’s Communist Hypothesis COMPETITION: Day 1

Yesterday we promised a competition to win all of Verso’s Alain Badiou books. You can see the books and the post detailing the rules here.

Here is the first person:

So who is this devotee of Badiou?

Check back tomorrow for the next, perhaps more unlikely, communist.

Alain Badiou’s new book The Communist Hypothesis is available now in hardback.

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New issue of International Socialism: Sheila Rowbotham reviewed, Shlomo Sand interviewed and a tribute to Daniel Bensaïd

The new issue of the International Socialism journal is out now, featuring Judith Orr on Sheila Rowbotham, Shlomo Sand interviewed by John Rose and Sebastian Budgen on the loss of a great intellectual – Daniel Bensaid and Chris Harman.

Judith Orr writes:

Sheila Rowbotham gives a fascinating account and new insight into some of the debates, organisations and publications that flourished in Britain and the US during this period in her new book, Dreamers of a New Day.

The full article, “Marxism and feminism today”,  is available here. Sheila Rowbotham’s new book Dreamers of a New Day is available now in hardback.

Shlomo Sand speaks to John Rose:

But you know the atmosphere around the established Jewish community in France is frightful. People are afraid. In France at first journalists were afraid to write about the book. However, after the war on Gaza a lot of walls fell down and people began to write more and more about the book. And now there is a pocketbook version and again it is in the bestsellers list. In 2009 the full-size version was the bestselling book about history. But don’t underestimate just how reactionary, racist and authoritarian the current mood of the pro-Zionist circles in the French Jewish community is. They remind me of the pro-Stalinist influence in Paris at the beginning of the 1950s or even the McCarthyist influence in the US at the same time.

The full article, “Interview: Zionism, socialism and nationalism”, is available here. Shlomo Sand’s book The Invention of the Jewish People is now available in paperback.

Sebastian Budgen pays tribute to Verso authors Daniel Bensaïd and Chris Harman, who both  sadly died this year:

For Chris Harman and Daniel Bensaïd, two men who have died at almost the same age and within months of each other—one after a monumental 20-year struggle against illness, the other plucked without warning from the night—scarcely addressed probably more than a few sentences directly to each other in over 40 years. And yet their lifelong, daily, uncomplaining commitment to combine the patient, often wearisome, work of building a small revolutionary group with that of trying to theoretically regenerate the grandeur of the classical Marxist tradition by fertilising it constantly with elements of the new was nonetheless a common endeavour.

The full article, “The Red Hussar: Daniel Bensaïd, 1946-2010”, is available here. Daniel Bensaïd’s book Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique is available in paperback. Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millenium is also available in paperback.

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COMPETITION NOW CLOSED: Alain Badiou’s Communist Hypothesis COMPETITION

To commemorate the publication of Alain Badiou’s Communist Hypothesis, we are  giving the opportunity for three people to win the whole of Alain Badiou‘s backlist in hardback.

From tomorrow, we will be posting an image of somebody holding Badiou’s new book The Communist Hypothesis every day for three days. The winners will be the first ones to identify all three people on the day of the last image being posted.

Here’s what you can win:

The Communist Hypothesis: A new program for the Left after the death of neoliberalism.

Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy: A journey through twentieth-century philosophy with the titan of French thought.

The Meaning of Sarkozy: A trenchant and witty dissection of the French political scene by the leading radical philosophers – now just published in paperback, this includes the first statement of Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’.

Polemics: A series of radical philosophical engagements with politics, first published in France in the ‘Circonstances’ series.

Metapolitics: Badiou critically examines the the concept of democracy and the link between truth and justice.

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil: Badiou shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve ultimately to reinforce an ideology of the status quo, and fail to provide a framework for an effective understanding of the concept of evil.

Check back tomorrow for the first image.

COMPETITION RULES

Entrants must email their answers to enquiries AT verso.co.uk (twitter and comment responses will not be accepted!), with their names and the addresses to which the prize should be sent. Emails sent before the final third image has been posted will not be accepted. The first three people with all the correct answers will win. The competition is only open to those outside of North America.

For more on the Communist Hypothesis see here, here and here.

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‘Grappling with Torture’- Joshua E. S. Phillips writes for The Washington Post

Joshua E. S. Phillips writes about meeting the American soldiers who have been involved in or witnessed abuse of prisoners for The Washington Post:

It seems each day brings heartbreaking news of American soldiers who’ve perished on the battlefield, and veterans who’ve taken their own lives. We tend to associate wartime trauma with combat, such as bloody firefights. But there are other grueling wartime events beyond the battlefield.

President Barack Obama recognized this last month when he extended veterans’ access for treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I’ve met enough veterans to know that you don’t have to engage in a firefight to endure the trauma of war,” said Obama.

That makes two of us.

About two years ago I met former Army interrogator, Don Dzagulones, who explained how his involvement in detainee abuse had a more harrowing long-term impact on him than surviving deadly ambushes in Vietnam.

The full article is available here.

Joshua E.S. Phillips’ new book None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture is available now in hardback.

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Gideon Levy in conversation with Jeremy Bowen at The Frontline Club, 25th August 2010

Acclaimed Israeli journalist and author of The Punishment of Gaza, Gideon Levy, will be in conversation with Jeremy Bowen at The Frontline Club, London, on Wednesday 25th August 2010.

On route to Edinburgh Literary Festival Gideon Levy will be joining us at the Frontline Club in conversation with BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen. He will be discussing recent developments in the Middle East and his book The Punishment of Gaza. In which he documents Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and charts the events leading up to the assault of 2009.

More information here. Book tickets here or call 020 7479 8940.

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‘David and Ed Miliband – if you really want to move on, listen to your father’ – Hilary Wainwright on the future of Labour

Hilary Wainwright writes for The Guardian:

The only candidate worthy of election is one who can be a voice for a politics that aims to put democracy in control of markets: that is, a party leader unlike any we have seen before, a politician who acts as one voice supporting a movement of many voices, coming mainly from outside the political class.

Here we might take off the shelves Parliamentary Socialism, the classic book on Labour by the late Ralph Miliband, David and Ed’s father. Miliband Sr analysed how Labour’s deep attachment to parliament, and the British state, overrides episodic and largely rhetorical commitments to socialist change. As he put it, “Of political parties claiming to be socialist, the Labour party has always been one of the most dogmatic – not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system”.

The full article is available here.

Hilary Wainwright’s book Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy is available in hardback.

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Angelo Quattrocchi’s The Pope is Not Gay! launch at September’s Polari

Polari Goes Pope | Southbank Centre

Angelo Quattrocchi’s The Pope is Not Gay! will launch on the 14th September at the Southbank Centre, from 6:30-9:00pm at September’s Polari, London’s “peerless gay literary salon”. Host Paul Burston presents readings from the book, musicians and performers protesting the Pope, including:

• David Hoyle: An artist working across stage, television and film, David Hoyle “embraces controversy as easily as he embraces the avant garde.”
• Ste McCabe: One-man-band who “blends punk rock riffs, pop melodies and retro beats with sarcastic, radical, queer, feminist lyrics.”
• Chloe Poems Music: Billed as “Britain’s first gay socialist transvestite poet”, Chloe Poems Music promises to bring “playful lyrics” and “a rock and roll ethos” to the evening’s proceedings.

Join the Facebook group for the event here.

See the Protest the Pope website for more events in protest of the Pope’s four-day state visit from 16-19 September.

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Gideon Levy’s The Punishment of Gaza and Mike Marqusee’s If I Am Not For Myself reviewed for Electronic Intifada

Asa Winstanley reviews Gideon Levy’s The Punishment of Gaza for The Electronic Intifada:

Levy is a searing critic of Israeli brutality, as anyone who has read him will know. Right from the beginning, he named the last major Israeli massacre of Gaza “a war crime” — in his 27 December 2008 article “The Neighborhood Bully Strikes Again.” And he criticized it on moral grounds, not merely as the “mistake” or “blunder” that hypocritical Israeli pundits, masquerading as critics, would label it much later on.

At his best, Levy has a way with words that leads him to some brilliant indictments of Israel. He speaks of “the basic, twofold Israeli sentiment that has been with us forever: to commit any wrong, but to feel pure in our own eyes. To kill, demolish, starve, imprison and humiliate — and to still be right, not to mention righteous.”

The full review is available here.

Winstanley also reviews Mike Marqusee‘s If I am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew for The Electronic Intifada:

A fascinating, meandering sort of family memoir. From the subtitle “Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew” one expects an autobiography. As it turns out, it mostly tells the story of Marqusee’s grandfather Edward V. Morand, based on an inherited suitcase full of his old personal letters, newspaper clippings and so forth.

Winstanley goes to to praise the book as “a crucial warning from history on Palestine for the liberal left of today.”

The full review is available here.

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Guardian Cif Belief Pope T-shirt winners

The Guardian Cif Belief competition to design a t-shirt to ‘welcome’ the Pope to Britian has finished and the winners have been announced.

Some good ones there, and we especially liked this one:

However, we’re disappointed that our own entry didn’t win:

But of course, this would still make the best t-shirt of all:

For more information on the book the Catholic Herald described as ‘deeply offensive’, click here.

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Christian Salmon’s Storytelling reviewed for the Washington Post

James P. Othmer reviews Christian Salmon’s Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind for the Washington Post, praising Salmon for his “analytical and intellectually satisfying approach”:

Salmon’s insights are thought-provoking and have ramifications beyond the world of advertising.

A writer and researcher at the Center for Research in the Arts and Language in Paris, Salmon contends that the storytelling methods that originated around Cro-Magnon campfires have been co-opted by politicians, corporate gurus, Hollywood, the military and of course, everyone’s favourite villain, advertisers.

The full article is available here.

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