Alberto Toscano | |
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Born | 1 January 1977 Moscow, USSR |
Nationality | Italian |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Western Marxism |
Main interests | Cultural criticism |
Part of a series on |
Communism in Italy |
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Communismportal |
Alberto Toscano (born 1 January 1977) is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher, and translator. He has translated the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou's The Century and Logics of Worlds. He served as both editor and translator of Badiou's Theoretical Writings and On Beckett.
Toscano was born in Moscow, USSR, on 1 January 1977. He studied philosophy at the Eugene Lang College, New School for Social Research, where he received his BA Liberal Arts in 1997. He received his MA in Continental Philosophy at the University College Dublin in 1999. He then went on to pursue a PhD in philosophy at the University of Warwick, which he completed in 2003. [1]
Toscano works across critical social theory and philosophy. His current research is divided into three main strands: [1]
His work has been described both as an investigation of the persistence of the idea of communism in contemporary thought and a genealogical inquiry into the concept of fanaticism. [2] He is the author of The Theatre of Production (2006), and his book Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea was published in 2010. Toscano has published on contemporary philosophy, politics and social theory. In an article on the Tarnac 9 case, written for The Guardian in December 2009, [3] Toscano argues that society is losing its ability to distinguish between vandalism and terrorism.
A reader in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, Toscano is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory . According to Alex Callinicos this journal "has been one of the main drivers of the academic revival of Marxism" [4] since the mid-1990s. Toscano is also the series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books. [5] [6]
Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, and is best known for his literary and philosophical collaborations with Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of their theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Gilles Louis René Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus.
Antonio Negri was an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire with Michael Hardt. Born in Padua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory. Negri founded the Potere Operaio group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and published highly influential books, including Empire and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, urging "revolutionary consciousness."
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
Alain Badiou is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou's work is heavily informed by philosophical applications of mathematics, in particular set theory and category theory. Badiou's "Being and Event" project considers the concepts of being, truth, event and the subject defined by a rejection of linguistic relativism seen as typical of postwar French thought. Unlike his peers, Badiou openly believes in the idea of universalism and truth. His work is notable for his widespread applications of various conceptions of indifference. Badiou has been involved in a number of political organisations, and regularly comments on political events. Badiou argues for a return of communism as a political force.
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a 1972 book by French authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the former a philosopher and the latter a psychoanalyst. It is the first volume of their collaborative work Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the second being A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation for philosophical perspectives informed by both the Marxist philosophy of Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. Its history within continental philosophy began in the 1920s and '30s and running since through critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism.
Peter Hallward is a political philosopher, best known for his work on Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. He has also published works on post-colonialism and contemporary Haiti. Hallward is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy and a contributing editor to Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
Raymond Brassier is a British philosopher. He is member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, known for his work in philosophical realism. He was formerly Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, England.
Jason Barker is a British theorist of contemporary French philosophy, novelist, film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is a professor of cultural studies at Kyung Hee University in the Graduate School of British and American Language and Culture, and visiting professor at the European Graduate School, where he teaches in the Faculty of Media and Communication alongside Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Avital Ronell, Slavoj Žižek, and others.
Bruno Bosteels has served as a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. As of 2024, Bosteels was Acting Dean of Humanities and Professor of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. He served until 2010 as the General Editor of diacritics.
Paolo Virno is an Italian philosopher, semiologist and a figurehead for the Italian Marxist movement. Implicated in belonging to illegal social movements during the 1960s and 1970s, Virno was arrested and jailed in 1979, accused of belonging to the Red Brigades. He spent several years in prison before finally being acquitted, after which he organized the publication Luogo Comune in order to vocalize the political ideas he developed during his imprisonment. Virno currently teaches philosophy at the University of Rome.
Frédéric Lordon is a French economist and philosopher, CNRS Director of Research at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique in Paris. He is an influential figure in France's Nuit debout movement and has regularly contributed to French broadcast and print media on French and European politics, and also writes a regular opinion column for Le Monde diplomatique. He has argued in favour of Communism as an alternative to Capitalism in books, articles and media appearances, and has been engaged in a project of re-grounding the social sciences in a Spinoza-inspired materialism. He is considered one of the most prominent intellectual voices of the radical left in France today.
Political Marxism (PM) is a strand of Marxist theory that places history at the centre of its analysis. It is also referred to as a form of neo-Marxism.
Oliver Feltham is an Australian philosopher and translator working in Paris, France. He is known primarily for his English translations of Alain Badiou, most notably Badiou’s magnum opus Being and Event (2006). Feltham's own writings are drawn from many of his research interests including Marxism, critical theory, and the history of metaphysics. His recent work has also focused on psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan.
Justin Clemens is an Australian academic known for his work on Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature. He is also a published poet.
According to the political theorist Alan Johnson, there has been a revival of serious interest in communism in the 21st century led by Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.
A. Kiarina Kordela is a Greek-American philosopher and critical theorist. She is a professor of German Studies and founding director of the Critical Theory Program at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN.
Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, Post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968. In a broader sense, post-Marxism can refer to Marxists or Marxian-adjacent theories which break with the old worker's movements and socialist states entirely, in a similar sense to post-Leftism, and accept that the era of mass revolution premised on the Fordist worker is potentially over.
Étienne Balibar is a French philosopher. He has taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, at the University of California Irvine and is currently an Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University and a visiting professor at the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.