O Grupo de Leitura RESONANCE é um encontro mensal da comunidade académica mais ampla do projeto RESONANCE, dedicado à reflexão sobre um texto ou livro importantes.

RESONANCE Reading Group

Session #8: Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis, by Alberto Toscano

The RESONANCE Reading Group is a monthly meeting that brings together members of the academic community, colleagues, friends, and enthusiasts of contemporary cultural history to reflect on and discuss a fundamental text or book. It is part of the project RESONANCE — Epistemologies for the Documentation of Affect and Becoming in Cultural Manifestations in Performance (1969-1979). This group meets in person at NOVA FCSH or online, during lunchtime on a weekday. Each participant brings their own lunch, and for in-person sessions, coffee and biscuits are kindly provided by the project.

In Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (2023), Alberto Toscano revisits twentieth-century antifascist theories to examine contemporary manifestations of fascism. Rather than understanding them primarily through historical analogies with interwar Europe, he approaches fascism as a historically changing process closely linked to capitalism, racism and colonial domination. The book explores what earlier theories can reveal about the present, while attending to the differences between classical fascism and contemporary reactionary politics.

In the opening chapter, “Out of Time”, Toscano draws on Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times (1935) to examine the relationship between fascism, historical temporality and collective desires. Central to this discussion is Bloch’s concept of non-contemporaneity: the coexistence of different social and historical temporalities within the same present. Bloch’s analysis helps explain how Nazism appropriated and redirected collective aspirations, unfulfilled hopes and memories of earlier ways of life towards reactionary ends. Toscano revisits Bloch’s understanding of fascism as a perverted utopian promise, while questioning how far this framework can illuminate contemporary fascism, which he characterises as largely deprived of the mass movements and utopian energies of its interwar predecessors.

In this session, through a collective reading of Toscano’s chapter, we aim above all to interrogate notions of contemporaneity and historical time. We are particularly interested in Toscano’s contemporary reading of Bloch and in how he draws on it to think about and intervene in the present.

To register for this session, please send an email to the project team at resonance.fcsh.unl@gmail.com.

More information about the RESONANCE project here.

The RESONANCE project is supported by the Programa Regional Lisboa 2030, Portugal 2030 and the European Union (LISBOA2030-FEDER-00914500). This work is also co-funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the reference 2023.17624.ICDT (DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/2023.17624.ICDT).