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Limited-Term Associate Professor

Digital Democracy Institute

E: atoscano@sfu.ca

Alberto Toscano

Alberto Toscano is Term Research Associate Professor at the School of Communication.

Alberto’s current research is divided into three main strands: 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; and the development of ‘real abstraction’ as a heuristic for the analysis contemporary capitalism, notably in its nexus with processes of racialization, automation and digitalization. He also maintains an abiding interest in artistic efforts to represent or ‘map’ racial capitalism, and in the revitalisation of a critical theory of political action informed by anti-colonial and anti-racist thought – as evidenced in his recent collection of essays Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum.

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. Alberto also edits Seagull Essays and sits on the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory.

• BA, Eugene Lang College, New School for Social Research (Liberal Arts)
• MA, University College Dublin (Continental Philosophy)
• PhD, University of Warwick (Philosophy) 

Courses

CMNS 311 D200: Topics in Communication and Social Justice (4): Media Revolutions

CMNS 410 E100: Media and Ideology

CMNS 804 G100: Seminar in Advanced Communication Theory: Automation, Authoritarianism and Autonomy

• Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (London and New York: Verso, 2023)
• Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (London and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2023)
• (ed. w/ Benjamin Noys) Georges Bataille, Critical Essays, vol. 1: 1944-1948 (London and Calcutta, 2023)
• (ed. w/ Sara Farris, Beverley Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg) Handbook of Marxism in 3 vols (London: SAGE, 2022)
• (ed. w/ Brenna Bhandar) Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (London and New York: Verso, 2022)
• La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital [Real Abstraction: Philosophy, Aesthetics and Capital] (Santiago de Chile: Palinodia, 2022) (in Spanish) 
• Una visión compleja. Hacia una estética de la economía [Complex Seeing: Toward an Aesthetics of the Economy] (Lima: Meier Ramirez, 2020) (in Spanish)
• The Communist Differend: Essays on Toni Negri and Alain Badiou (Tokyo: Koshisha, 2017) (in Japanese)
• 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 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006)
• ‘A Test of Names: Franco Fortini and Primo Levi on the Language of Anti-Fascism’, CounterText 9.2 (2023): 236-248.
• ‘The Rise of the Far Right is a Global Phenomenon’, In These Times, 10 November 2023, https://inthesetimes.com/article/global-far-right-meloni-milei-putin-bannon-orban
• ‘The War on Gaza and Israel’s Fascism Debate’, Verso blog, [French: ; Spanish: , https://versolibros.com/blogs/news/la-guerra-contra-gaza-y-el-debate-sobre-el-fascismo-en-israel]
• ‘Landscape and Autopsy: Photography and the Natural History of Capital’, Philosophy of Photography 13.2 (2023): 213-229
• ‘The Horrible Work of History: Georges Bataille and the Actuality of Hegel’, qui parle 32.1 (2023): 105-135.
• ‘Gramsci in Florida’, The New Statesman, 4 March 2023, 
• ‘Introduction: Echoes of Marx’, in Ludovico Silva, Marx’s Literary Style (London and New York: Verso, 2023)
• ‘From Sadism to Solidarity: Notes on Art, Philosophy and the Algerian War’, ARTMargins11.3 (2022): 8-23
• ‘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)
• 'Ira et studium, or, tragedy as vocation', in Vocations of the Political: Mario Tronti & Max Weber, ed. H. Caygill (London: CRMEP, 2021)
• ‘The Tragic Festival’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 49.3-4 (2021)
• ‘T³ó±ð&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Faust Variations’, Symposium on Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology, Historical Materialism 29.1 (2021)
• , 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)
• , in Sick of the System: Why the COVID-19 Recovery must be Revolutionary (Toronto: BTL, 2020)
• , 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 50^th 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.
• , Oxford Encyclopaedia of Literary Theory, ed. J. Frow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)

• Critical Theory
• Marxism
• Contemporary European Philosophy
• Italian Thought and Literature
• Tragedy
• Racial Capitalism
• Fascism
• Anti-Colonial Thought 
• Media and Communication Theory
• Aesthetics, Visual Culture and Art Theory