Professor Alberto Toscano

Staff details

Alberto is a critical social theorist and philosopher writing on fascism, racial capitalism and emancipation.

Alberto works across critical social theory and philosophy. His 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.

Academic qualifications

  • BA Liberal Arts, Eugene Lang College, New School for Social Research 1997
  • MA in Continental Philosophy, University College Dublin 1999
  • PhD in Philosophy, University of Warwick 2003

Research interests

• 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

Publications and research outputs

Book

Toscano, Alberto. 2017. Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2nd edition). London: Verso. ISBN 9781786630544

Toscano, Alberto and Kinkle, Jeffrey. 2015. Cartographies of the Absolute. Alresford: Zero Books. ISBN 9781780992754

Toscano, Alberto. 2010. Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea. London: Verso. ISBN 9781844674244

Edited Book

Skeggs, Beverley; Farris, Sara R.; Toscano, Alberto and Bromberg, Svenja, eds. 2021. The SAGE Handbook of Marxism. London: SAGE Publications. ISBN 9781473974234

Book Section

Toscano, Alberto. 2019. Tragedy. In: John Frow, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Toscano, Alberto. 2019. Mayakovsky at Mirafori: Operaismo and the Negation of Poetry’. In: Ruth Jennison and Julian Murphet, eds. Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 109-129. ISBN 9783030171568

Toscano, Alberto. 2018. Antiphysis/Antipraxis: Universal Exhaustion and the Tragedy of Materiality. In: Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti, eds. Materialism and the Critique of Energy. MCM' Publishing, pp. 471-499.

Article

Toscano, Alberto. 2021. Elsewhere and Otherwise: Introduction to a Symposium on Fredric Jameson’s ‘Allegory and Ideology’. Historical Materialism, 29(1), pp. 113-122. ISSN 1465-4466

Toscano, Alberto. 2021. The Faust Variations. Historical Materialism, 29(1), pp. 162-173. ISSN 1465-4466

Toscano, Alberto. 2021. The Tragic Festival. Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 49(3-4), pp. 657-681. ISSN 0146-7891

Articles related to Professor Alberto Toscano