Books
State of Disappearance
State of Disappearance brings together the power of artistic testimony and witnessing with critical voices to ask deeper questions about extreme violence, the normalization of human vanishing, state and ideological complicity, and memorialization, along with wider concerns about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. A full-published gallery of dedicated artworks by Mexican abstract painter Chantal Meza inspires each chapter, bringing the aesthetic into critical conversation and leading to a multidisciplinary collection that charts a new path for recovering humanity in the face of its annihilation.
Ecce Humanitas: Beholding the Pain of Humanity
The very idea of humanity seems to be in crisis. Born in the ashes of devastation after the slaughter of millions, the liberal conception of humanity imagined a suffering victim in need of salvation. Today, this figure appears less and less capable of galvanizing the political imagination. But without it, how are we to respond to the inhumane violence that overwhelms our political and philosophical registers? How can we make sense of the violence that was carried out in the name of humanism? And how can we develop more ethical relations without becoming parasitic on the pain of others?
When the Towers Fell
Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the September the 11th attacks, When the Towers Fell provides a timely intervention on the impact and legacy of that day. Curated by Brad Evans, it provides 26 contributions from Adriana Cavarero, Akeel Bilgrami, Ayça Çubukçu, Bruce Robbins, Carol Becker, David Theo Goldberg, Libby Anker, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gil Anidjar, Henry Giroux, Jake Chapman, Lile Chouliaraki, Michael Shapiro, R.A. Judy, Richard Bernstein, Roland Bleiker, Samuel Moyn , Samuel Weber, Simona Forti, Susanna Siegel, Tarak Barkawi, Todd May, Vincent Brown, and William Connolly.
Conversations on Violence: An Anthology
Whether physical or metaphorical, institutional or interpersonal, violence is everywhere. A seemingly immutable fact of life, it is nonetheless rarely engaged with at the conceptual level. What does violence actually mean? And is it an inevitable part of the human condition? Violence: An Anthology brings together many of the world's leading critical scholars, artists, writers and cultural producers to provide a kaleidoscopic exploration of the concept of violence. Through in-depth interviews with thirty one figures including Marina Abramovic, Russell Brand and Simon Critchley, Brad Evans and Adrian Parr interrogate violence in all its manifestations, including its role in politics, art, gender discrimination and decolonisation.
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The Quarantine Files
In 2020 the world was sent into lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Curated by Brad Evans, this book provided a response to the crisis by inviting reflections from 25 globally renowned critical thinkers, writers and artists. The wide-ranging collection articles were initially published online and also part of an e-publication produced by the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Atrocity Exhibition
This collection of essays spanning over a decade covers many of the key areas of Brad Evans thinking on Violence. Selected to launch the new Los Angeles Review of Books "Provocations" series, it deals with what Brad terms Life in the Age of Total Violence, addressing the multiple ways violence appears to us in the world. With introductions from Russell Brand and Henry A. Giroux, the book also features a number of co-written pieces and interviews, including with Simon Critchley, Adrian Parr, Julian Reid, Michael Hardt, along with Brand & Giroux.
Violence: Humans in Dark Times
In a series of penetrating conversations, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard talk with a wide range of cutting-edge thinkers—including Oliver Stone, Simon Critchley, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—to explore the role of violence in politics, culture, the media, public speech, and against the environment. First published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, these lively, in-depth exchanges among historians, theorists, and artists offer a timely and bracing look at how the increasing expression and acceptance of violence—in all strata of society—has become a defining feature of our times .
Histories of Violence
Though we can all agree that violence is a devastating plague upon human existence and that peace would lead to more prosperous relations around the world, violence still continues to be deployed by a wide range of groups for numerous political and social ends. And though we all fear violence, what actually constitutes violence, who perpetuates it, and why, are questions of great debate, which have drawn the attention of the world’s foremost thinkers for centuries. Offering an accessible introduction to post-war critical thought on the topic, Histories of Violence examines how many prominent theorists from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Slavoj Žižek have grappled with these questions.
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Portraits of Violence
Recipient of Independent Publishers Award for Graphic Novel (2018).
How are we to educate about violence in the contemporary period? What intellectual resources can we draw upon in our critique of violence in the 21st Century? What pedagogical and illustrative tools can we develop to engage with the problem of violence to appeal to multiple audiences in innovative and transformative ways? And how might we connect critical theory with the arts and humanities so that the problem of violence becomes more central to public debate and concern? Addressing these questions through a visual exploration of ten key thinkers, Portraits of Violence is a unique collaboration between Brad Evans & the comic book writer Sean Michael Wilson.
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Disposable Futures
Disposable Futures offers a sweeping critique of consumption-driven society and how State and corporate power use and abuse violence to redefine citizenship, national security, and economics in order to enrich the few. From movies and entertainment, to extreme weather and acts of terror, Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux take readers on a fascinating exploration of politics, culture, and power to expose how the production of spectacle shapes and controls social realities while diminishing meaningful civic life and community. Centered on the power of public education, Evans's and Giroux's critique is rooted in a deep sense of hope in humanity and the emancipatory possibilities for dignified and nonviolent forms of living, learning, and resisting.
Resilient Life
What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or an ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political issue, fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’ that is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century. ​In this original and compelling text, Brad Evans and Julian Reid explore the political and philosophical stakes of the resilience turn in security and governmental thinking. Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise. All life now enters into lasting crises that are catastrophic unto the end.
Liberal Terror
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Security is meant to make the world safer. Yet despite living in the most secure of times, we see endangerment everywhere. Whether it is the threat of another devastating terrorist attacks, a natural disaster or unexpected catastrophe, anxieties and fears define the global political age. While liberal governments and security agencies have responded by advocating a new catastrophic topography of interconnected planetary endangerment, our desire to securitize everything has rendered all things potentially terrifying. This is the fateful paradox of contemporary liberal rule. The more we seek to secure, the more our imaginaries of threat proliferate. Through an incisive and philosophically enriched critique of the contemporary liberal practices of making life more secure, Brad Evans forces us to confront the question of what it means to live politically as we navigate through the dangerous uncertainty of the 21st Century.
Deleuze & Fascism
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This edited volume by Brad Evans & Julian Reid deploys Deleuzian thinking to re-theorize fascism as a mutable problem in changing orders of power relations dependent on hitherto misunderstood social and political conditions of formation. The book provides a theoretically distinct approach to the problem of fascism and its relations with liberalism and modernity in both historical and contemporary contexts. It serves as a seminal intervention into the debate over the causes and consequences of contemporary wars and global political conflicts as well as functioning as an accessible guide to the theoretical utilities of Deleuzian thought for critical scholars & International Relations theorists.