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Papers by Alberto Toscano

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?

O fanatizmu 19. i 20. svibnja 2009. klub MaMa, Zagreb http://fanaticism.mi2.hr Fanatizam je poslj... more O fanatizmu 19. i 20. svibnja 2009. klub MaMa, Zagreb http://fanaticism.mi2.hr Fanatizam je posljednjih godina sve češće istraživani pojam-obuhva ćajući širok spektar značenja između politike i religije, racionalnog i afektivnog, istine i laži. Zagrebački skup o fanatizmu predstavlja priliku da zajedno s trojicom istaknutih teoretičara raspravimo tu važnu temu iz očišta politike istine, neprijateljstva i nove geografije globalnosti. " Osama bin Laden crpi energiju iz parazitskog odnosa spram Zapada kojeg napada

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...

Proyecto académico sin fines de lucro, desarrollado bajo la iniciativa de acceso abierto

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...

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.

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 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.

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?

O fanatizmu 19. i 20. svibnja 2009. klub MaMa, Zagreb http://fanaticism.mi2.hr Fanatizam je poslj... more O fanatizmu 19. i 20. svibnja 2009. klub MaMa, Zagreb http://fanaticism.mi2.hr Fanatizam je posljednjih godina sve češće istraživani pojam-obuhva ćajući širok spektar značenja između politike i religije, racionalnog i afektivnog, istine i laži. Zagrebački skup o fanatizmu predstavlja priliku da zajedno s trojicom istaknutih teoretičara raspravimo tu važnu temu iz očišta politike istine, neprijateljstva i nove geografije globalnosti. " Osama bin Laden crpi energiju iz parazitskog odnosa spram Zapada kojeg napada

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...

Proyecto académico sin fines de lucro, desarrollado bajo la iniciativa de acceso abierto

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...

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.

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 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.