Alberto Toscano
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Symmetry and Solidarity in the Settler Colony Revisiting Albert Camus's Algerian Writings Open
In a critical engagement with Marc Crépon's Murderous Consent, this essay revisits Albert Camus's writings on Algeria, from 1939 to the throes of the war of independence. Against the argument that Camus's work can provide a moral and philo…
Art and Class Struggle Open
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 …
Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives Open
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 o…
Elsewhere and Otherwise Open
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 alle…
The Tragic Festival Open
This article explores the idea of the 'tragic festival' advanced by Henri Lefebvre in his 1965 book La Proclamation de la Commune and related texts from the 1960s and 70s. It contextualises his vision of the Commune as a violent revolution…
The State of the Pandemic Open
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 guara…
Capitalism without Capitalism Open
This article explores the theorisation of fascism across Žižek’s oeuvre, from the 1980s to the present. It situates his Lacanian response to the problematic category of ‘totalitarianism’ in its original Yugoslav context, foregrounding the …
Planning for Conflict Open
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 …
The Ignoble Savage: Racism, Myth, and the Anthropological Machine Open
The Ignoble Savage:Racism, Myth, and the Anthropological Machine Alberto Toscano (bio) You civilized peoples, who are for ever speaking foolishly about Savages and Barbarians—soon, as d'Aurevilly says, you will have become too worthless ev…
The Civil War of Images. Political Tragedies, Political Iconographies Open
This article explores the place of civil war in recent debates on political iconography. It begins with two recent theoretical and curatorial interventions into art history, by T. J. Clark and Georges Didi-Huberman, which orbit around the …
Structured by cows Open
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...
I Stood Before the Source Open
''Capitalism’s representations are ubiquitous; less so are representations of capitalism. I stood before the source traverses varied contemporary scenes of accumulation, from data centres to tar sands, airports, prisons, trading bots, fact…