Alberto Toscano - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Alberto Toscano
French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century; Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction
Radical Philosophy, 2002
Everybody thinks Deleuze, Descartes and rationalism
Radical Philosophy, 2010
Hegel hoy: el pensador de las contradicciones del presente
Herder, 2020
ARTMargins, 2021
What do we need to know about “art” or “class struggle” before considering their relation to one ... more 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 of the visible and invisible still hold for conceptual and post-conceptual art? What alternative critical apparatus would you propose, since neither Lenin nor John William Cooke seemed to care much for art. Why should we?
The SAGE Handbook of Marxism
Lineaments of the Logistical State
Sometimes, we have to look in unlikely places for news that can nourish a radical political imagi... more Sometimes, we have to look in unlikely places for news that can nourish a radical political imagination...
Photography Against the Flow: Abstraction and Logistics in Allan Sekula's Writings
By contraries execute all things
Radical Philosophy, 2019
Contro il "realismo speculativo di Meillasoux (a partire da Colletti)
Proyecto académico sin fines de lucro, desarrollado bajo la iniciativa de acceso abierto
Taming the Furies: Badiou and Hegel on The Eumenides
Prólogo.: Un nuevo inicio para Hegel
Hegel hoy, 2020
Traducendo I cani del Sinai e Verifica dei poteri
The call to decolonise philosophy demands, among other things, a preliminary assessment of the sh... more The call to decolonise philosophy demands, among other things, a preliminary assessment of the shaping power of the colonial relation across the discipline’s history. Such an inquiry involves an excavation of how the European encounter with, and exploitation of, other peoples conditioned the different forms taken by the problem of anthropological difference.1 My concern in this essay is to explore how philosophers adopted, adapted and transformed – and in a sense invented – the figure of the savage from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. In particular, I want to examine the varying and sometimes contradictory ways in which the savage emerged as the living negation or inverted image of civilisedWestern humanity. I have been greatly inspired in this undertaking – of which this essay is but a preliminary sketch – by two still-untranslated landmark works of philosophical historiography by Italian scholars, Sergio Landucci’s Philosophers and Savages and Giuliano Gliozzi’s...
Alien Mediations: Critical Remarks on The Making of the Indebted Man
Those rooting around for a bleak allegory for our subprime present could do worse than the dystop... more Those rooting around for a bleak allegory for our subprime present could do worse than the dystopian denizens of exurban spaces in K.W. Jeter’s novel Noir, the fittingly named indeadted. Artificially kept alive until they repay outstanding debts, they stalk the landscape of commodity refuse, scavenging, salvaging, recycling to shave off infinitesimal portions of their liabilities, living-dead labour both unproductive and profitable. Telescoping hi-tech financial expropriation and the lo-tech labour in the breakers yards of global capital, the indeadted embody a moment in which subjection to capitalist imperatives subsumes life to the point that it trespasses into death, a hyperbolic echo of the quotidian horror of phenomena like ‘dead peasant insurance’, whose benefits are reaped by corporations with the demise of their unwitting employees...
What might it mean to be a communist in philosophy, or to treat communism as a philosophical idea... more What might it mean to be a communist in philosophy, or to treat communism as a philosophical idea? A scandal or an anachronism for its detractors, such a question is not likely to sit well with communism’s relatively sparse and beleaguered partisans, for whom speculative abstraction might stand as the nemesis of concrete politics. This essay seeks to foreground what I’d like to call the politics of abstraction – signalling both the political contests over the conceptual definition of communism and the often polemical characterization of communism as an abstract politics – in order to reconsider the manner in which philosophy is caught up in the very emergence of the idea of communism. Communism develops both from and against philosophy. To rethink the idea of communism today is also to rethink this double movement, of immanence and separation, inheritance and refusal.
Introduction to the Italian translation of Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form
Historical Materialism, 2021
This text is essayist, critic and poet Franco Fortini’s introduction to the Italian translation o... more 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 Drama of Being: Figures of Individuation in Deleuze’s Philosophy of Difference
The Theatre of Production, 2006
In the foregoing chapters I sought to trace a series of speculative constellations capable of und... more In the foregoing chapters I sought to trace a series of speculative constellations capable of undoing the subordination of the problem of individuation to its Kantian matrix, with the aim of drawing out the ontological consequences of the paradoxical encounter with the problem of life that had beset Kant in the Critique of Judgment. Through this treatment of Kant’s own unfinished work, of Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism, of Nietzsche’s critique of teleology, of Peirce’s theory of habit and of Simondon’s relational account of ontogenesis, we have accumulated some of the ingredients for an alternative model of individuation. On this basis we have begun to discern how the question of the organic might no longer elicit a merely regulative solution, opening up instead onto a philosophy of production concerned with the inquiry into the preindividual sources of individuality, or better, into relations and operations that account for the individuated without presupposing it in turn. As Nietzsche’s critical reflections made so forcefully clear, one of the principal tasks in this respect is that of contesting the de jure dominance of a philosophy of identity and representation over an inquiry into the morphogenesis of beings and the genesis of the intellect. Thus, it was in order to designate a counter-tradition within the philosophy ofindividuation founded on the reversal of this primacy, that I referred, somewhat barbarously, to an ontology of anomalous individuation.
Economic psychology
Economy and Society, 2007
No more than the idea of value, the idea of money is not the exclusive domain of economists. Mone... more No more than the idea of value, the idea of money is not the exclusive domain of economists. Money serves primarily as the measure of riches, but not of them alone. First of all, by dint of being the yardstick of riches [le mètre des richesses ] which are such to the extent they satisfy desires and are judged apt to satisfy them money is also the yardstick of these desires and these beliefs. It can serve just as well to measure with a certain approximation by comparing the figures of pious bequests, of gifts made at different times to the clergy or to monastic orders the waning or awakening of religious beliefs and mystical desires; by comparing the receipts of theatres where the pieces of different schools are played, it can measure the greater or lesser vogue of these forms of art; by a good statistical study of book sales (if it can be carried out, which is a demanding desideratum ), the relative success of different genres of writing and the different writers that represent them, as well as the subsequent variations of this success, which would inform us as to the variations in the public consciousness [esprit public ], and so on. Money is therefore the universal yardstick of social quantities, and not only of riches. We may therefore make the following general remark: as a measure of riches, money is only concerned with exchanges, sales or purchases; but, as a measure of beliefs considered separately from desires, it is concerned above all with donations or even thefts. It is by munificence, by generosities toward scientific, literary, philanthropic, or patriotic works, by sponsoring statues or public displays of one sort or another, that each of us expresses the nature and force of the convictions governing his life, of the lights constellating his internal sky.
French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century; Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction
Radical Philosophy, 2002
Everybody thinks Deleuze, Descartes and rationalism
Radical Philosophy, 2010
Hegel hoy: el pensador de las contradicciones del presente
Herder, 2020
ARTMargins, 2021
What do we need to know about “art” or “class struggle” before considering their relation to one ... more 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 of the visible and invisible still hold for conceptual and post-conceptual art? What alternative critical apparatus would you propose, since neither Lenin nor John William Cooke seemed to care much for art. Why should we?
The SAGE Handbook of Marxism
Lineaments of the Logistical State
Sometimes, we have to look in unlikely places for news that can nourish a radical political imagi... more Sometimes, we have to look in unlikely places for news that can nourish a radical political imagination...
Photography Against the Flow: Abstraction and Logistics in Allan Sekula's Writings
By contraries execute all things
Radical Philosophy, 2019
Contro il "realismo speculativo di Meillasoux (a partire da Colletti)
Proyecto académico sin fines de lucro, desarrollado bajo la iniciativa de acceso abierto
Taming the Furies: Badiou and Hegel on The Eumenides
Prólogo.: Un nuevo inicio para Hegel
Hegel hoy, 2020
Traducendo I cani del Sinai e Verifica dei poteri
The call to decolonise philosophy demands, among other things, a preliminary assessment of the sh... more The call to decolonise philosophy demands, among other things, a preliminary assessment of the shaping power of the colonial relation across the discipline’s history. Such an inquiry involves an excavation of how the European encounter with, and exploitation of, other peoples conditioned the different forms taken by the problem of anthropological difference.1 My concern in this essay is to explore how philosophers adopted, adapted and transformed – and in a sense invented – the figure of the savage from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. In particular, I want to examine the varying and sometimes contradictory ways in which the savage emerged as the living negation or inverted image of civilisedWestern humanity. I have been greatly inspired in this undertaking – of which this essay is but a preliminary sketch – by two still-untranslated landmark works of philosophical historiography by Italian scholars, Sergio Landucci’s Philosophers and Savages and Giuliano Gliozzi’s...
Alien Mediations: Critical Remarks on The Making of the Indebted Man
Those rooting around for a bleak allegory for our subprime present could do worse than the dystop... more Those rooting around for a bleak allegory for our subprime present could do worse than the dystopian denizens of exurban spaces in K.W. Jeter’s novel Noir, the fittingly named indeadted. Artificially kept alive until they repay outstanding debts, they stalk the landscape of commodity refuse, scavenging, salvaging, recycling to shave off infinitesimal portions of their liabilities, living-dead labour both unproductive and profitable. Telescoping hi-tech financial expropriation and the lo-tech labour in the breakers yards of global capital, the indeadted embody a moment in which subjection to capitalist imperatives subsumes life to the point that it trespasses into death, a hyperbolic echo of the quotidian horror of phenomena like ‘dead peasant insurance’, whose benefits are reaped by corporations with the demise of their unwitting employees...
What might it mean to be a communist in philosophy, or to treat communism as a philosophical idea... more What might it mean to be a communist in philosophy, or to treat communism as a philosophical idea? A scandal or an anachronism for its detractors, such a question is not likely to sit well with communism’s relatively sparse and beleaguered partisans, for whom speculative abstraction might stand as the nemesis of concrete politics. This essay seeks to foreground what I’d like to call the politics of abstraction – signalling both the political contests over the conceptual definition of communism and the often polemical characterization of communism as an abstract politics – in order to reconsider the manner in which philosophy is caught up in the very emergence of the idea of communism. Communism develops both from and against philosophy. To rethink the idea of communism today is also to rethink this double movement, of immanence and separation, inheritance and refusal.
Introduction to the Italian translation of Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form
Historical Materialism, 2021
This text is essayist, critic and poet Franco Fortini’s introduction to the Italian translation o... more 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 Drama of Being: Figures of Individuation in Deleuze’s Philosophy of Difference
The Theatre of Production, 2006
In the foregoing chapters I sought to trace a series of speculative constellations capable of und... more In the foregoing chapters I sought to trace a series of speculative constellations capable of undoing the subordination of the problem of individuation to its Kantian matrix, with the aim of drawing out the ontological consequences of the paradoxical encounter with the problem of life that had beset Kant in the Critique of Judgment. Through this treatment of Kant’s own unfinished work, of Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism, of Nietzsche’s critique of teleology, of Peirce’s theory of habit and of Simondon’s relational account of ontogenesis, we have accumulated some of the ingredients for an alternative model of individuation. On this basis we have begun to discern how the question of the organic might no longer elicit a merely regulative solution, opening up instead onto a philosophy of production concerned with the inquiry into the preindividual sources of individuality, or better, into relations and operations that account for the individuated without presupposing it in turn. As Nietzsche’s critical reflections made so forcefully clear, one of the principal tasks in this respect is that of contesting the de jure dominance of a philosophy of identity and representation over an inquiry into the morphogenesis of beings and the genesis of the intellect. Thus, it was in order to designate a counter-tradition within the philosophy ofindividuation founded on the reversal of this primacy, that I referred, somewhat barbarously, to an ontology of anomalous individuation.
Economic psychology
Economy and Society, 2007
No more than the idea of value, the idea of money is not the exclusive domain of economists. Mone... more No more than the idea of value, the idea of money is not the exclusive domain of economists. Money serves primarily as the measure of riches, but not of them alone. First of all, by dint of being the yardstick of riches [le mètre des richesses ] which are such to the extent they satisfy desires and are judged apt to satisfy them money is also the yardstick of these desires and these beliefs. It can serve just as well to measure with a certain approximation by comparing the figures of pious bequests, of gifts made at different times to the clergy or to monastic orders the waning or awakening of religious beliefs and mystical desires; by comparing the receipts of theatres where the pieces of different schools are played, it can measure the greater or lesser vogue of these forms of art; by a good statistical study of book sales (if it can be carried out, which is a demanding desideratum ), the relative success of different genres of writing and the different writers that represent them, as well as the subsequent variations of this success, which would inform us as to the variations in the public consciousness [esprit public ], and so on. Money is therefore the universal yardstick of social quantities, and not only of riches. We may therefore make the following general remark: as a measure of riches, money is only concerned with exchanges, sales or purchases; but, as a measure of beliefs considered separately from desires, it is concerned above all with donations or even thefts. It is by munificence, by generosities toward scientific, literary, philanthropic, or patriotic works, by sponsoring statues or public displays of one sort or another, that each of us expresses the nature and force of the convictions governing his life, of the lights constellating his internal sky.