On the Side of Violence

To produce On the Side of Violence: Essays, the collection’s editor, John Paul Ricco, worked intensively alongside eminent queer theorist and author William Haver to select a series of the most pressing, provocative essays from Haver’s extensive œuvre. Beginning with Jean Genet’s writing on Palestine, the collection features Haver’s writing on the aesthetic and political valences of solitude, solidarity, finitude, the common, and the insurgent potential of queer research. 

Essays in this exceptional collection include: “On the Side of Violence,” “On the Solitude of Things,” “Finitude Now,” and “A Sense of the Common,” all of which relay urgent political configurations. Also included in this collection are “The Art of Dirty Old Men,” “Queer Research, or How to Practice Invention to the Brink of Intelligibility,” as well as “Really Bad Infinities,” and “Interminable AIDS,” among other pathbreaking essays. The book concludes with the author’s coda, “Reading Prisoner of Love After October 7th,” which explores what he names as the “pathetic apprehension of the common.”

William Haver is the author of The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS, and the translator and editor of Nishida Kitarō’s Ontology of Production: Three Essays. 

John Paul Ricco is the author of Queer Finitude, The Decision Between Us, and The Logic of the Lure; his essay on muse-ecology and disappearance was featured in volume 6 of K. Verlag’s intercalations: paginated exhibition series, These Birds of Temptation. 

Forthcoming on 3 November 2025 — available for pre-order now.