Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he co-directs the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought. He is Visiting Faculty at the Digital Democracy Institute, School of Communication, SFU.
Alberto’s current research is divided into three main strands: a theoretical inquiry into contemporary authoritarian trends and their dis/analogies with their historical predecessors, culminating in the forthcoming book Late Fascism (Verso, 2021); the study of tragedy as a framework through which to understand political action and its discontents, from decolonisation to environmentalism; and the development of ‘real abstraction’ as a heuristic for the analysis contemporary capitalism, notably in its nexus with processes of racialisation. As the series editor of The Italian List for Calcutta-based publisher Seagull books, Alberto’s research is also concerned with the translation and reception of Italian literature, literary criticism and critical theory.
EDUCATION
BA, Eugene Lang College, New School for Social Research (Liberal Arts)
MA, University College Dublin (Continental Philosophy)
PhD, University of Warwick (Philosophy)
CURRENTLY TEACHING
Courses
CMNS 410 E100: Media and Ideology
PUBLICATIONS
(ed. w/ Sara Farris, Bev Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg) Handbook of Marxism in 3 vols (London: SAGE, 2021)
(ed. w/ Brenna Bhandar) Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (London: Verso, forthcoming 2021)
Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle) (Winchester: Zero, 2015)
Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010; new ed. 2017)
The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze
‘Introduction: Psychoanalysis in Reverse’, in Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (London: Verso, 2021)
‘The Tragic Festival’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 49.3-4 (2021)
‘The Faust Variations’, Symposium on Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology, Historical Materialism 29.1 (2021)
‘The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism’, Boston Review, 28 October 2020.
‘Night and Fog in Japan: Towards Another Critique of Violence’, in The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68, ed. Gavin Walker (London: Verso, 2020)
‘Beyond the Plague State’, in Sick of the System: Why the COVID-19 Recovery must be Revolutionary (Toronto: BTL, 2020)
‘Capitalism without Capitalism. Fascism According to Žižek’, Res Pública. Revista de Historia de las Ideas Políticas, 23 (3) (2020): 365-373.
(w/ Matteo Mandarini) ‘Planning for Conflict’, special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, ‘The Return of Economic Planning’, ed. Campbell Jones 119.1 (2020)
‘Wrong Place, Right Time: ’68 and the Impasses of Periodization’ (w/ Evan Calder Williams), Cultural Politics, special issue on the 50th anniversary of 1968, 15.3 (2019)
‘The Ignoble Savage: Racism, Myth and the Anthropological Machine’, special section ed. by Kieran Aarons on Furio Jesi in Theory & Event 22.4 (2019):1105-1124.
‘Tragedy’, Oxford Encyclopaedia of Literary Theory, ed. J. Frow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)
RESEARCH
critical theory
Marxism
contemporary European philosophy
Italian thought and literature
tragedy
racial capitalism
fascism
