Join us at e-flux on Tuesday, December 12 at 7 pm for a lecture and in-depth conversation with Alberto Toscano about his major new book Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, released this fall from Verso Books. Toscano will be in dialogue with Evan Calder Williams, e-flux journal Contributing Editor.

In the words of Robin D.G. Kelley, “Late Fascism is brilliant, incisive, and right on time.” From the “Great Replacement” to campaigns against critical race theory and “gender ideology,” today’s global far right is launching lethal panics about the threats to traditional political, sexual, and racial hierarchies. But counter to the prevalent contemporary attempt to situate these contemporary tendencies within a static framework of early twentieth-century fascism, Toscano develops a rigorous and expansive reading of the concept. Drawing especially on Black radical and anti-colonial theories of fascism, Toscano makes clear the limits of associating fascism primarily with the kind of political violence experienced by past European regimes.

Rather than looking for analogies from history, the book argues we should instead see fascism as a mutable process, one anchored in racial and colonial capitalism, which both predates and survives its crystallization in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. It is a threat that continues to evolve in the present day, and Late Fascism offers crucial resources not only for “the program of watchfulness he so carefully constructs to uncover the contemporaneity of late fascism in our midst,” (Harry Harootunian) but also for the continued and necessary development of ongoing anti-fascist thought and organization.

An excerpt of the book was published by e-flux journal #139 in October under the title “Racial Fascism.”

Alberto Toscano teaches at the School of Communications, Simon Fraser University, and co-directs the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), Cartographies of the Absolute(with Jeff Kinkle, Zero Books, 2015), La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital (Palinodia, 2021), and Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull, 2023). He is the co-editor of the 3-volume The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (with Sara Farris, Bev Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg, SAGE, 2022), Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography: Essays in Liberation (with Brenna Bhandar, Verso, 2022), and Georges Bataille’s Critical Essays (with Benjamin Noys, Seagull, 2023). He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and series editor of Seagull Essays and The Italian List for Seagull Books. He has also translated the work of Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Franco Fortini, and Furio Jesi.

For more information, contact [email protected].

Accessibility

• Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
• For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
• e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

Time: 7:00 pm EST

Free!

Registration