Alberto Toscano

Alberto Toscano
Alberto Toscano
Born	1 January 1977; Moscow, USSR
Nationality	Italian
Philosophical work
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Western Marxism
Main interests	Cultural criticism

Alberto Toscano (born 1 January 1977) is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher, and translator. He has translated the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou's The Century and Logics of Worlds. He served as both editor and translator of Badiou's Theoretical Writings and On Beckett.

Work

Toscano was born in Moscow, USSR, on 1 January 1977. He studied philosophy at the Eugene Lang College, New School for Social Research, where he received his BA Liberal Arts in 1997. He received his MA in Continental Philosophy at the University College Dublin in 1999. He then went on to pursue a PhD in philosophy at the University of Warwick, which he completed in 2003.^[1]

Toscano works across critical social theory and philosophy. His current research is divided into three main strands:^[1]

a theoretical and historical inquiry into the politics of authoritarianism and their links to the racial, geopolitical and gendered crises of capital, set out in his recent book Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis;
the study of tragedy as a framework through which to understand collective politics and its discontents, from decolonisation to climate action;
the development of ‘real abstraction’ as a heuristic for the analysis contemporary capitalism, notably in its nexus with processes of racialization, automation and digitalization.

His work has been described both as an investigation of the persistence of the idea of communism in contemporary thought and a genealogical inquiry into the concept of fanaticism.^[2] He is the author of The Theatre of Production (2006), and his book Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea was published in 2010. Toscano has published on contemporary philosophy, politics and social theory. In an article on the Tarnac 9 case, written for The Guardian in December 2009,^[3] Toscano argues that society is losing its ability to distinguish between vandalism and terrorism.

Formerly Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, Toscano is currently Term Research Associate Professor at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University.^[4] He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. According to Alex Callinicos this journal "has been one of the main drivers of the academic revival of Marxism" ^[5] since the mid-1990s. Toscano is also the series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books.^[6]^[7]

Selected bibliography

Translated books

Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, London: Continuum, 2009.
Alain Badiou, The Century, London: Polity, 2007.
(with M. Mandarini) Antonio Negri, Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, London: Verso, 2007.
Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
(with Ray Brassier) Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, London: Continuum, 2004.
(with E.R. Albert), Éric Alliez, The Signature of the World, Or, What is Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy?, London: Continuum, 2004.
(with Nina Power) Alain Badiou, On Beckett, London: Clinamen Press, 2003.
(with Benjamin Noys) Georges Bataille, Critical Essays. London and Calcutta: Seagull, 2023.

Edited book

(with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano) Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays in Liberation. London and New York: Verso, 2022.

Authored books

The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006.
Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea. New York: Verso, 2010; 2017, 2nd ed..
- Le Fanatisme. Modes d'emploi. La fabrique, 2011 (FR).
Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle). Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015.
The Communist Differend: Essays on Toni Negri and Alain Badiou. Tokyo: Koshisha, 2017.
Una visión compleja. Hacia una estética de la economía. Lima: Meier Ramirez, 2020.
La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital. Santiago, Chile: Palinodia, 2021.
The SAGE Handbook of Marxism, in 3 vol. (with Sara Farris, Bev Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg). London: SAGE, 2022.
Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum. London and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2023.
Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. London and New York:Verso, 2023.