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• 50% off our Theory Shelves!

  In the newly published Metaphilosophy, Henri Lefebvre works through the implications of Marx’s revolutionary thought to consider philosophy’s engagement with the world.
  
  Designed with this beautiful die-cut cover (cover design by Neil Donnelly), Metaphilosophy is a key text in Lefebvre’s oeuvre and a milestone in contemporary thinking about philosophy’s relation to the world.
  
  To mark publication of Metaphilosophy we have 50% off this book, and a selection of some of the best from our theory shelves, when you buy two books or more. Includes recent releases Reading Captital: A Complete Edition, and An American Utopia, as well as best-sellers like Critique of Everyday Life. See below, and to the right, for the full list. Click here to activate your 50% off.
  
  

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  By Verso Books / 27 July 2016 / comments

• Win! Tickets to the Curzon's Almodóvar in August season and a copy of Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar

  Verso has teamed up with Curzon Cinemas to celebrate Almodóvar in August, their mini-retrospective of recent films by Spain’s greatest living filmmaker with a giveaway competition. We're offering three lucky winners the chance to win a pair of tickets for any screening in the season and a copy of Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar by Paul Julian Smith.

  In the last decade, Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar has grown from critical darling of the film circuit scene to mainstream success. Frequently comic, often deadly serious, always visually glorious, his recent films range from the Academy Award–winning drama Talk to Her to the 2011 horror film The Skin I Live In. Though they are ambitious and varied in style, each is a distinctive innovation on the themes that have defined his work. 
  
  

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  By Sarah Shin / 27 July 2016 / comments

• Stuart Elden: Reading Marx in 1965; Reading Althusser et. al. and Lefebvre in 2016

  Some of the most important works of post-war French Marxism were published in 1965. Louis Althusser’s For Marx was accompanied by his seminar group’s collaborative volume Reading Capital, and Henri Lefebvre’s Metaphilosophy appeared the same year. Both Reading Capital  and Metaphilosophy now appear, in complete translations, from Verso.
  
  

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  By Stuart Elden / 27 July 2016 / comments

• “The complete subjugation of urban policy”: An interview with Raquel Rolnik

  Raquel Rolnik is an architect and urbanist from São Paulo. Between 2008 and 2014, she was United Nations special rapporteur for the right to adequate housing. Rolnik, a professor at the University of São Paulo, is the author of several books including a book about housing forthcoming from Verso. 

  Niklas Franzen's interview with Rolnik first appeared in German in Jungle World and translated by Flossie Draper. 
  
  
  Vila Autódromo, 2015. Via Flickr. 
  
  In your book Guerra dos Lugares (War of Places), published at the beginning of the year, you write about the worldwide “financialisation” of cities. What role does the housing market play in global capitalism?

  The housing market has in recent years become one of the central pillars of global financial capitalism. That has happened over the entire world — in a variety of ways. A significant process has been the fact that construction companies have opened themselves up to the flow of capital from other sectors. Furthermore, in some countries a secondary mortgage market emerged, which presented a new financial circuit. By abolishing all prospects of social housing, countries have propelled these processes. Thus the purchase of property on credit has prevailed as the only means of gaining access to housing.

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  By Niklas Franzen / 27 July 2016 / comments

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