Join us on October 1, 2026, at 12:30 pm PT for the first Ziegler lecture of 2026-2027.
Focusing on the theme of ‘fragments’, CENES welcomes Dr. Alberto Toscano from Simon Fraser University.
This lecture is co-hosted by the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies.
Abstract
Based on a reading of Peter Weiss’s 3-volume The Aesthetics of Resistance (Die Ästhetik des Widerstands), this talk explores how the problem of fragmentation – incorporating questions of sectarianism, incommunicability, geographical dispersion, and even psycho-physical experiences of rupture – is critical to an understanding of the phenomenon of fascist repression and counter-revolution and to the politics and poetics of anti-fascism, in other words to antifascism’s forms. The talk will explore how the antifascist fragment is foregrounded and problematized by Weiss, and how his project of poetic and political reconstruction resonates in our current conjuncture.
About the Speaker
Alberto Toscano is the author of Communism in Philosophy: Essays on Alain Badiou and Toni Negri (2025), Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (2023), Terms of Disorder: Keywords of an Interregnum (2023), Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2017, 2nd ed) and Cartographies of the Absolute (with J. Kinkle, 2015). He is the co-editor (with B. Noys) of Georges Bataille’s Critical Essays (3 vols, 2023-) and (with S. Bromberg, S. Farris and B. Skeggs) of The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (2022). He edits the series Seagull Essays and The Italian List for Seagull Books and is a columnist for In These Times. He has translated books by Franco Fortini, Furio Jesi, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Gianni Carchia and Antonio Negri. He is Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and will be International Chair of Contemporary Philosophy at Université Paris 8 in 2027.
How to attend:
This lecture is a hybrid event and takes place on October 1, 2026, at 12:30pm PT.
If you are planning to attend in-person in Buchanan Tower 997, please RSVP here.
For those wanting to attend online via Zoom, attendees must register ahead of the event. Please note that this is a recorded event.
Questions? Please email cenes.undergrad@ubc.ca
