A Toscano
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 22649 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | A Toscano |
| NOMBRES | A |
| APELLIDO | Toscano |
| FIRMA | TOSCANO A |
| AFILIACIONES | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0009-0007-5156-5414 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 66 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 192 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 66 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Raça, Classe, Tragédia
Este ensaio revisita as especulações metapolíticas (ou arquipolíticas) de Nietzsche sobre a Europa através dos prismas interligados de classe e raça. Ele examina em que medida uma modalidade de ‘racismo de classe’ – ou, na formulação de Domenico Losurdo, um ‘racismo transversal’ –cumpriria um papel nas visões antidemocráticas de Nietzsche de uma unificação europeia. Em uma seção final, o ensaio rastreia elementos da problematização tardia de Niet…
Fascism in Our Time
The Moving Image of Racial Capitalism
This article undertakes a critical survey of Cedric Robinson's writings on film. It foregrounds the methodological and political insights generated by his understanding of "racial regimes" as pertains to the study of films and genres that consolidate racial orders, while also underscoring how it enhances our appreciation of oppositional cinematic practices. Though critics have taken the idea of racial capitalism to task as idealist, the article e…
Palestine Book Forum
Freedom from tragedy
Late fascism and education
On the legitimacy of conservative ideology
Rhodes Must Rise
On multiple occasions, Theodor W. Adorno turned to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West as a resource for the critical anatomy of a capitalist society in which laissez-faire liberalism was being overtaken by an authoritarian coordination of the political and the economic. This article revisits Spengler’s reactionary prophecies about late capitalist civilization in light of Adorno’s arguments. It explores a dimension of Spengler’s thought ins…
New Fascisms and the Crises of Empire
The 1970s witnessed debates about new fascistic forms of capitalist counterrevolution among militant intellectuals across the world. This article briefly maps some of the Latin American debates over the analytical and political pertinence of the category of fascism as applied to the military dictatorships of that time. It explores competing ideas of dependent fascism, fascism as project, and the counterinsurgent state, while homing in on two cruc…
The Horrible Work of History
This article critically surveys Georges Bataille’s multiple engagements with G. W. F. Hegel from the early 1930s to the 1950s. It homes in on how Bataille’s conceptual, experiential, and parodic demarcation from Hegel targets not the German philosopher’s aspiration to totality but (via Bataille’s dialogue with Alexandre Kojève) his action-centered framing of the movement of history and the character of actuality. Against the dialectical mastery o…
Shifting Currents
Sadism to Solidarity
This essay considers a range of artistic and intellectual responses to the Algerian War of Independence that foregrounded the problem of extreme violence. It homes in on the suggestive nexus between anti-colonial solidarities in the metropole and the obsessive concern of artistic, literary, and philosophical avant-gardes with the thought of the Marquis de Sade. It explores how the returns to and of Sade that punctuated the French intellectual sce…
Landscape and autopsy
This article takes inspiration from Allan Sekula's remarks on New Topographics photography, as well as his own 'geography lessons', to interrogate how photographs of 'man-altered landscapes' give visual form to the problems of temporality, natural history and historical agency that mark life in the Capitalocene. It proposes that combining Fredric Jameson's analysis of the way that capital congeals 'quantities of the past' into dead labour with An…
Tragedy and Juridical Forms
Foucault returned to the text of Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannos at various critical junctures in his thought. This article homes in on the place of that tragedy in the passage from the analytic of knowledge-power to the problematization of government by truth that took place around 1980, namely in Foucault's Collège de France lectures. Particular attention is placed on the delineation of the political meaning of "alethurgy," a neologism through whi…
Art and Class Struggle
What do we need to know about “art” or “class struggle” before considering their relation to one another? Could you describe a specific work or text that might serve as an illustration of class struggle or as an exploration of the problem of representing it? Let us say that visual art, broadly speaking, does express the worldview of the dominant class. What kind of art then expresses the worldview of, say, hedge fund managers? Does the dialectic …
Incipient Fascism
The sordid twilight of the Trump presidency raised the stakes of the debate on fascism. While much of the discussion has been magnetised by the legitimacy of analogies with the 1930s, this article argues that a rich and complex tradition of Black radical critique of right-wing authoritarianism provides a vital resource for thinking through the problem of US fascism beyond analogy – beginning with the DuBoisian insight that a racial fascism forged…
West-Eastern Tragedies
Elsewhere and Otherwise
This text introduces the symposium on Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology (2019), the second volume in his six-part The Poetics of Social Forms . It frames the debate with a brief exploration of some of the figures and problems of allegory that appear across Jameson’s œuvre , and surveys some of the Marxist conceptualisations of allegory that have shaped Jameson’s approach, as it straddles allegories of the commodity and allegories of utopia.…
Fascists, Freedom, and the Anti-State State
Most theorisations of fascism, Marxist and otherwise, have taken for granted its idolatry of the state and phobia of freedom. This analytical common sense has also inhibited the identification of continuities with contemporary movements of the far Right, with their libertarian and anti-statist affectations, not to mention their embeddedness in neoliberal policies and subjectivities. Drawing on a range of diverse sources – from Johann Chapoutot’s …
Introduction to the Italian translation of Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form
This text is essayist, critic and poet Franco Fortini’s introduction to the Italian translation of Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form . Fortini frames his assessment of Jameson in terms of a contrast with the Italian reception of the dialectical criticism assayed in Marxism and Form
The State of the Pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic has further intensified a crisis in the functions and the perception of the state. It has also revealed underlying contradictions in both mainstream and radical ideologies of the state. A desire for the state as guarantor of public welfare vies with fear of the state’s hypertrophic capacities for surveillance and control. Following a brief exploration of the intimate modern connection between plagues and the state, the artic…
The Faust Variations
This essay explores Jameson’s reading of Goethe’s Faust II in Allegory and Ideology , putting it into dialogue with enquiries into Goethian allegory by other Marxist critics, namely Georg Lukács, Cesare Cases and Franco Fortini. Allegories of monetisation and dispossession in Faust II are explored, along with the limits of Lukács’s partial devaluation of the allegorical. The essay focuses in particular on how Jameson’s reading of Faust II can be …
Planning for Conflict
Planning is widely perceived as an approach to economic life that both subordinates decisions about production and distribution to a supposedly objective Science and as an illegitimate subjection of economic laws to a commanding political Will. This article excavates two key phases in the Soviet experiment with a planned economy, namely, the New Economic Policy under Lenin and the Stalinist institution of the five-year plan, to explore the way in…
The Ignoble Savage
You civilized peoples, who are for ever speaking foolishly about Savages and Barbarianssoon, as d'Aurevilly says, you will have become too worthless even to be idolaters
Last Philosophy
Beginning with his engagement with Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s seminal treatment of ‘real abstraction’, Intellectual and Manual Labour , Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly thematised and excavated the proposition that capitalism is innervated by a kind of actually-existing metaphysics, the scandal of an abstract form external to human cognition. This essay investigates Žižek’s use and criticism of Sohn-Rethel and outlines some of the developments and contradic…
The Open Secret of Real Abstraction
This article revisits the Marxist debate on 'real abstraction' in order to evaluate the relevance of this concept to a period marked by the rise of cognitive capitalism and a proliferation of discourses on abstraction in social theory. The article touches on the interpretive debates around Marx's 1857 Introduction and tries to identify the tensions and contradictions at work in the distinctive contributions of Louis Althusser, Alfred Sohn-Rethel,…
The Culture of Abstraction
Focusing especially on Science and the Modern World, this article explores Whitehead's understanding of the social contexts and repercussions of mathematical and scientific abstraction. It investigates his remarks on the need to offset pernicious practices of abstraction in the context of a renewed concern with the link between conceptuality and materiality in social theory. Whitehead's inquiry into the problematic legacy of Galileo and scientifi…
Vital Strategies
In the heat of the revolutionary councils movement of Turin in 1921, this was one of the epithets hurled at the likes of Antonio Gramsci for his supposed spontaneism, so at odds with the gradualism and evolutionism that had characterized much of the Second International's use of Marx's Capital (Gramsci, 1921). Such a perceived conjunction of radical politics and Bergsonism - a philosophy which, to all intents and purposes, presents itself as anyt…
Factory, territory, metropolis, Empire
Divine Management
This essay seeks to evaluate the methodological and theoretical relevance of Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory to a radical critique of contemporary politics and economics. In particular, it explores what is meant by the "theological genealogy of the economy and government" announced by the book's subtitle. This involves subjecting to scrutiny Agamben's reliance on a certain understanding of secularisation, of the kind that permits him to decla…
Spectres of Marxism
This article is a critique of Mike Savage's 'From the "problematic of the proletariat" to a class analysis of the "wealth elites"'. It first rejects the notion of the 'problematic of the proletariat' - the importance of a dividing line between the working and middle class - instead situating the argument within contemporary debates on class analysis. The critique introduces the broader context of neoliberalism and financialization, alongside a co…
Seeing it Whole
Can, or should, social theory try to 'see it whole'? This article explores some of the aesthetic, political and conceptual issues that arise when we pose the problem of representing social totality today. It revisits two influential assertions of theory's calling to generate orienting and totalizing representations of capitalist society: C. Wright Mills' plea for the 'sociological imagination' and Fredric Jameson's appeal for an 'aesthetic of cog…
Reformism and Melancholia
This article addresses the persistence of reformism in sociological responses to the crisis. It begins by considering the temporal meaning of crisis and connects it to an appraisal of the extent to which the alternative 'reformism or revolution' still conditions our thinking. The article goes on to consider radical arguments for the obsolescence of reform. It suggests that a focus on the sociology of knowledge has impaired the discipline's capaci…
Powers of pacification
The thought of Gabriel Tarde has recently been presented as a radical alternative to a modernist tradition in social theory that continues to rely on supposedly moribund concepts of class, action, statehood, and the like. Focussing on Tarde's political writings, this article seeks to counter this prevalent vision of Tarde as a thinker of molecular social processes who provides us with the tools to think beyond the parameters of sovereignty and to…
Beyond Abstraction
This article reconsiders Marx’s thinking on religion in light of current preoccupations with the encroachment of religious practices and beliefs into political life. It argues that Marx formulates a critique of the anticlerical and Enlightenment-critique of religion, in which he subsumes the secular repudiation of spiritual authority and religious transcendence into a broader analysis of the ‘real abstractions’ that dominate our social existence.…
The World Is Already without Us
This article revisits the problematic of the cognitive mapping of capital by probing the affinity between two representational predicaments: the depopulated nature of images of human-altered landscapes in the "new topographics" photography and its epigones, and the current debate over the definition of the Anthropocene. It looks in Fredric Jameson's treatment of the time of capital, and of the place therein of dead labor, for a clue to critically…
Materialism without matter
In light of the contemporary theoretical infatuation with ‘new’ materialisms, matter and materiality, this essay revisits the heterodox Marxian thesis according to which materialism may, in Étienne Balibar's formulation, have ‘nothing to do with a reference to matter’. The article explores variants of this materialism without matter: Antonio Gramsci's objections to Bukharin's ‘Marxist sociology’, Theodor W. Adorno and Alfred Sohn-Rethel's critiqu…
Transition Deprogrammed
Recent debates about communism, the commons, and communization have for the most part either neglected the question of transition or viewed it as an obstacle to the development of contemporary revolutionary thought and practice. This sidelining or criticism of transition frequently relies on ahistorical or one-dimensional renderings of it, which ironically mimic the very dogmas that they purport to attack. This article explores the possibility of…
David Harvey
The Sensuous Religion of the Multitude
Through a detailed reading of Antonio Negri’s collection of letters on art, Arte e Multitudo, this article enquires into the place and the uses of art in his writings. It identifies abstraction as the pivotal theme in the Italian philosopher’s reflections on aesthetics. Abstraction is a cipher for the defeats of the extra‐parliamentary left and the imposition of a seemingly inescapable postmodern capitalism, but it is also the starting‐point for …
New Fascisms and the Crises of Empire
The 1970s witnessed debates about new fascistic forms of capitalist counterrevolution among militant intellectuals across the world. This article briefly maps some of the Latin American debates over the analytical and political pertinence of the category of fascism as applied to the military dictatorships of that time. It explores competing ideas of dependent fascism, fascism as project, and the counterinsurgent state, while homing in on two cruc…
Planning for Conflict
Planning is widely perceived as an approach to economic life that both subordinates decisions about production and distribution to a supposedly objective Science and as an illegitimate subjection of economic laws to a commanding political Will. This article excavates two key phases in the Soviet experiment with a planned economy, namely, the New Economic Policy under Lenin and the Stalinist institution of the five-year plan, to explore the way in…
Wrong Place, Right Time
This essay critically approaches the use of “1968” as a periodizing category by contrasting historiographic and political debates on the event and aftermath of the French May with the spatial and temporal unevenness that attaches to Italy’s “long” 1968. We explore two interlocking dimensions of the latter: the reprise of the “Southern question” in the midst of this sociopolitical upheaval, on the one hand, and the potent if enigmatic image of an …
The Detour of Abstraction
This article provides a reconstruction of the theory of abstraction elaborated by Louis Althusser in two recently published book manuscripts of the second half of the 1970s, Être marxiste en philosophie (1976, published in 2015) and Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes (1978, published in 2014). It focuses in particular on the practical character of abstraction, or more precisely, on the plurality of abstractive practices explored…
Partisan Thought
What is the relationship between materialism and partisanship today? Starting with an outline of the elements of Lenin's understanding of the partisan character of truth, this intervention outlines some of the challenges posed to a Marxist understanding of partisanship by the influential positions of Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt, as well as by the recent turn to vitalism and complexity in social theory. On the basis of the confrontation betwe…
Shifting Currents
Elsewhere and Otherwise
This text introduces the symposium on Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology (2019), the second volume in his six-part The Poetics of Social Forms . It frames the debate with a brief exploration of some of the figures and problems of allegory that appear across Jameson’s œuvre , and surveys some of the Marxist conceptualisations of allegory that have shaped Jameson’s approach, as it straddles allegories of the commodity and allegories of utopia.…
Structured by cows
Fabian Muniesa has composed a commendably comprehensive, compact map of the so-called performative turn in social studies of the economy. Part I of the book provides the curious scholar with a limp
Capital (It Fails Us Now)
This introduction to Historical Materialism ’s mini-symposium on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century places the three contributions by Husson, Mann and Roberts in the context of an exploration of the link between methodology and politics in Piketty’s economic history of inequality. Touching on the role of time and literature in Piketty’s argument, as well as on his difficulty in accounting for the relations of capital – especiall…
A Plea for Prometheus
This essay takes issue with Critchley's diagnosis of the motivation crisis at the core of our supposedly nihilist political present, and with its pejorative characterization of a vanguardist or Leninist Left. Against the reliance of Infinitely Demanding on an anarchic metapolitics of responsibility, it proposes that we rethink the concept of solidarity and develop an intra-political ethics of egalitarianism, an ethics of unconditional rather than…
Art Against Empire
This article provides a brief commentary on Éric Alliez and Antonio Negri's 'Peace and War', focusing mainly on their understanding of political ontology, their analysis of the transformations undergone by the link between sovereignty and warfare, and their attempt to delineate the place of artistic practice within a biopolitics of the multitude
Factory, territory, metropolis, Empire
La disparation
Est-il possible d’extraire des écrits de Gilbert Simondon les linéaments d’une pensée (de la) politique ? On esquissera une réponse affirmative en portant notre attention sur trois aspects de la philosophie de Simondon : 1. la façon dont le concept de Nature ou de pré-individuel déplace les débats sur le rapport entre action politique, nature humaine et capacité biologique ; 2. l’importance de l’excès du sujet sur l’individu comme matrice d’une p…
The political Descartes
Antonio Negri, the renowned co-author of 'Empire', provides this study of the founder of modern philosophy. The book is available in English for the first time
Situationists
The situationists were a collective of anti‐capitalist thinkers, active from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, who theorized the alienated character of modern consumer society and its revolutionary overcoming. Plagued throughout its history by splits and expulsions, the Situationist International (SI) was formed in 1957 from a number of tiny avant‐garde groups, including the Lettrist International and the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. The S…
David Harvey
Vital Strategies
In the heat of the revolutionary councils movement of Turin in 1921, this was one of the epithets hurled at the likes of Antonio Gramsci for his supposed spontaneism, so at odds with the gradualism and evolutionism that had characterized much of the Second International's use of Marx's Capital (Gramsci, 1921). Such a perceived conjunction of radical politics and Bergsonism - a philosophy which, to all intents and purposes, presents itself as anyt…
Powers of pacification
The thought of Gabriel Tarde has recently been presented as a radical alternative to a modernist tradition in social theory that continues to rely on supposedly moribund concepts of class, action, statehood, and the like. Focussing on Tarde's political writings, this article seeks to counter this prevalent vision of Tarde as a thinker of molecular social processes who provides us with the tools to think beyond the parameters of sovereignty and to…
The Open Secret of Real Abstraction
This article revisits the Marxist debate on 'real abstraction' in order to evaluate the relevance of this concept to a period marked by the rise of cognitive capitalism and a proliferation of discourses on abstraction in social theory. The article touches on the interpretive debates around Marx's 1857 Introduction and tries to identify the tensions and contradictions at work in the distinctive contributions of Louis Althusser, Alfred Sohn-Rethel,…
Sovereign Impunity
Alberto Toscano on Danilo Zolo, La giustizia dei vincitori: Da Norimberga a Baghdad. A Florentine legal scholar traces the postwar development of a system of punitive international law, and its 1990s deployment by the West to impose ‘victors’ justice’
Carl Schmitt in Beijing
To each epoch—its own wars.Lenin, marginal annotation to Clausewitz's On War From Iraq to South Ossetia, theorists and pundits who have advocated a return to geopolitical realism seem to have plent
The Culture of Abstraction
Focusing especially on Science and the Modern World, this article explores Whitehead's understanding of the social contexts and repercussions of mathematical and scientific abstraction. It investigates his remarks on the need to offset pernicious practices of abstraction in the context of a renewed concern with the link between conceptuality and materiality in social theory. Whitehead's inquiry into the problematic legacy of Galileo and scientifi…
Partisan Thought
What is the relationship between materialism and partisanship today? Starting with an outline of the elements of Lenin's understanding of the partisan character of truth, this intervention outlines some of the challenges posed to a Marxist understanding of partisanship by the influential positions of Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt, as well as by the recent turn to vitalism and complexity in social theory. On the basis of the confrontation betwe…
A Plea for Prometheus
This essay takes issue with Critchley's diagnosis of the motivation crisis at the core of our supposedly nihilist political present, and with its pejorative characterization of a vanguardist or Leninist Left. Against the reliance of Infinitely Demanding on an anarchic metapolitics of responsibility, it proposes that we rethink the concept of solidarity and develop an intra-political ethics of egalitarianism, an ethics of unconditional rather than…
The Sensuous Religion of the Multitude
Through a detailed reading of Antonio Negri’s collection of letters on art, Arte e Multitudo, this article enquires into the place and the uses of art in his writings. It identifies abstraction as the pivotal theme in the Italian philosopher’s reflections on aesthetics. Abstraction is a cipher for the defeats of the extra‐parliamentary left and the imposition of a seemingly inescapable postmodern capitalism, but it is also the starting‐point for …
The Philosophy of Restoration
Alain Badiou has defined his philosophical project in terms of the attempt to account for the abandonment and betrayal of the revolutionary impetus in the 1970s. This article examines this contention by tracking the way in which the definition of different antipolitical or anti-emancipatory figures plays a crucial role in the development of Badiou's theory of political subjectivity. How are we to think subjects which oppose, betray, or neutralize…
Beyond Abstraction
This article reconsiders Marx’s thinking on religion in light of current preoccupations with the encroachment of religious practices and beliefs into political life. It argues that Marx formulates a critique of the anticlerical and Enlightenment-critique of religion, in which he subsumes the secular repudiation of spiritual authority and religious transcendence into a broader analysis of the ‘real abstractions’ that dominate our social existence.…
The Spectre of Analogy
Alain Badiou
Anti-Sociology and Its Limits
Mao and Manichaeism
Divine Management
This essay seeks to evaluate the methodological and theoretical relevance of Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory to a radical critique of contemporary politics and economics. In particular, it explores what is meant by the "theological genealogy of the economy and government" announced by the book's subtitle. This involves subjecting to scrutiny Agamben's reliance on a certain understanding of secularisation, of the kind that permits him to decla…
Seeing it Whole
Can, or should, social theory try to 'see it whole'? This article explores some of the aesthetic, political and conceptual issues that arise when we pose the problem of representing social totality today. It revisits two influential assertions of theory's calling to generate orienting and totalizing representations of capitalist society: C. Wright Mills' plea for the 'sociological imagination' and Fredric Jameson's appeal for an 'aesthetic of cog…
Manifeste pour une philosophie sociale, Franck Fischbach, Paris
In this polemical intervention within the field of French and European social theory, Franck Fischbach proposes to revive and radicalise the tradition of social philosophy. The latter is understood, following Axel Honneth, in terms of the normatively-driven analysis of socio-economic processes that may be characterised as pathologies of the social. Fischbach contrasts the lessons of social philosophy from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School with the…
Profecía congelada
Este pequeño ensayo pretende ir más allá de las celebraciones hagiográficas que hacen del Manifiesto Comunista un monumento para reflexionar sobre las lecciones que se pueden extraer de las formas específicas de su fallida realización. Contra el cliché de que el Manifiesto es un texto profético, deberíamos explorar la disyunción entre el pronóstico incisivo de la “prosa” del capitalismo y la anticipación frustrada de la “poesía” de la revolución.…
Philosophy (46 obras) · Law (42 obras) · Political science (42 obras) · Politics (40 obras) · Sociology (40 obras) · Epistemology (35 obras) · Law (28 obras) · Philosophy (28 obras) · Art (22 obras) · History (22 obras)