Term Research Associate Professor

Digital Democracy Institute

E: atoscano@sfu.ca

Alberto Toscano

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.

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

Courses

CMNS 410 E100: Media and Ideology

• (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 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.
• ‘Tragedy’, 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