Overview

What is this moment we are living in? Late Fascism turns to the theories of fascism produced in the past century, testing their capacity to illuminate our moment and challenging many of the commonplaces that debate on this extremely charged term devolves into. It can be tempting for any contemporary assessment of fascism to reach for historical analogy. Fascism is a matter of returns and repetitions, but it is not best approached in terms of steps and checklists dictated by a selective reading of Italian Fascism or National Socialism. Rather than treating fascism as a singular event or identifying fascism with a particular configuration of European parties, regimes, and ideologies, Toscano approaches fascism as a process, one which is intimately linked to capitalism's demands for domination. Late Fascism names a problem. Fascism, like other political phenomenon, varies according to its socioeconomic context. An unreflexive struggle against fascism runs the risk of becoming sclerotic, self-indulgent, or complicit with the very processes that brought forth reaction, the lesser evil lending a hand to the greater one. When it does not question its own theoretical frameworks, its own habits of naming, or indeed the pleasures (of innocence, heroism, righteousness) that may arise from these, anti-fascism can be its own lure. Late Fascism allows us to rediscover some truly inspiring anti-fascist thinkers, rooted in their turn in largely anonymous collective practices of worldmaking against domination, traditions of the oppressed which remain a resource for those set on dismantling the oppressions that the partisans of Order and Tradition seek to revive and reimpose.

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Toscano wipes the smug smiles off the self-righteous faces of the New Philosophers. -- Mike Davis

"There are no unearned claims here. Rather, one feels that Toscano has thought through the political stakes of every single sentence in this crucial book. Late Fascism is painstaking in accounting for, differentiating, and connecting the many historical contexts and iterations of fascism - from the onset of colonial modernity, through the mid-twentieth century, to the present day. -- Jordy Rosenberg, author of <i>Confessions of the Fox</i> Alberto Toscano's Late Fascism brilliantly elucidates what Adorno once called 'the meaning of working through the past' to grasp fascism's capacious aptitude for untimely reappearances to resolve crises, real or not, to save capitalism from itself and restore the necessary political order such rescue operations require. Rather than drawing upon fascism's past in his approach, Toscano 's account persuasively lays to rest an interpretative scheme that explains such unscheduled repetitions by appealing to analogical comparisons of past and present as if they were the same. His own strategy positions history and memory against the present to disturb one another, unveiling uneven historical differences and incommensurables removed from an everyday dominated by exchange. Toscano's lasting achievement is the program of watchfulness he so carefully constructs to uncover the contemporaneity of late fascism in our midst, but never too late to recognize its ever-present morbidities. -- Harry Harootunian, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Chicago In this bold book, Alberto Toscano argues that the old checklist for identifying and understanding contemporary fascism won't work. To apprehend its present-day manifestations, we must consult writers from the Black radical tradition and critical ethnic studies. With his characteristic erudition, Toscano combines innovative readings of Western Marxism with insightful interpretations of the genealogies of anti-racism. This is an indispensable book for a distressing time. -- Roderick A. Ferguson, Yale University Alberto Toscano is one of the most significant and original political theorists of our contemporary moment. In this work on the nature and aetiology of late fascism, he moves us beyond the European interwar examples as fascism's ""ideal-type,"" and deconstructs the alleged opposition of fascism and liberal democracy. He instead emphasizes multiple origins, locations, and temporalities of fascisms; the imbrication of fascisms within colonialism, slavery, capitalism and counter-revolution; and is precise about fascisms' libidinal claims and the weaponizing of atavistic social energies turned against racial, religious, sexual and gendered others. Toscano engages an illuminating range of anti-fascist thought: from Ernst Bloch, Georges Bataille, and Leo Löwenthal, to Angela Davis and George Jackson; from Stuart Hall and Ruth Wilson Gilmore to Jairus Banaji and Furio Jesi - with dazzling results. -- Lisa Lowe, author of <i>The Intimacies of Four Continents</i> Can we speak of fascism before fascism? Alberto Toscano believes we can. In his learned excavation of debates across the twentieth century, he revives still unanswered questions about the location of the prison, the market, and the bedroom in theories of fascism. He also reminds us to ask what late fascism is afraid of. What is it trying to prevent? In this way, a study of fascism becomes a roundabout recovery of repressed and forgotten utopias-a flashlight in the dead of night. -- Quinn Slobodian, author of <i>The Globalists</i> Late Fascism is brilliant, incisive, and right on time. We are living through a moment when the ""F"" word is no longer taboo and the threat of fascism lurks everywhere. And yet, so mired in debates over definitions, typologies, and analogies that our understanding of fascism remains elusive. Alberto Toscano avoids this trap by turning to anti-fascist thinkers, whose groundings in anticolonial, antiracist, and anticapitalist struggles remind us that liberalism is no enemy of fascism, and fascists flower in the hot house of capitalism. -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of <i>Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination</i> Toscano's wide-ranging, erudite study is both theoretically satisfying and politically inspiring - an essential reference for rethinking fascism and antifascist politics today. -- Michael Hardt, author of <i>The Subversive Seventies</i> In this book, Toscano provides us with the language and analysis necessary to theorize our current moment, one in which the danger of fascism is as real as ever. -- Jake Romm * Protean *"

Author Information

Alberto Toscano is Professor of Critical Theory in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Term Research Associate Professor at the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University. 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), Una visión compleja. Hacía una estética de la economía (Meier Ramirez, 2021), La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital (Palinodia, 2021), and the co-editor of the 3-volume The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (with Sara Farris, Bev Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg, SAGE, 2022), and Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Abolition Geography: Essays in Liberation (with Brenna Bhandar, Verso, 2022). He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and is series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books. He is also the translator of numerous books and essays by Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Franco Fortini, Furio Jesi and others.

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