Alberto Toscano’s lecture: Tragedy under Siege

28 Nov 2025 - 13:00 / 28 Nov 2025 - 15:00

The Department of Philosophy and
The Centre for Comparative Literature present

Alberto Toscano, Simon Fraser University
Tragedy under Siege

Friday, November 28, 2025, 1:00-3:00
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Larkin Building, room 200, 15 Devonshire Place

In his 1937 text, “Nietzschean Chronicle,” published in the wake of the aerial bombing of Guernica and during the siege of Madrid by Franco’s Nationalist forces, Georges Bataille took the occasion of Jean-Louis Barrault’s staging of Cervantes’ The Siege of Numantia to deploy a critique of popular-frontist or humanist anti-fascism anchored in the tragic myth-image of the Spanish city that had sought to resist Roman invasion, only to be destroyed in 133 BC. Up against the servile sovereignty imposed by modern state-forms (“German Caesarism” or “Soviet Caesarism”), the only alternative for Bataille was “the community without a leader, bound together by the obsessive image of tragedy”. The talk will explore the nexus of anti-politics, anti-fascism and tragedy in Bataille’s thinking of the 1930s, its post-war attenuations and the broader resonances of the “siege” as a site through which to think political aesthetics.

Alberto Toscano, professor emeritus of  Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the co-director of its Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought. He currently lives in Vancouver and teaches at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Dr. 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 for an Interregnum (2023) and Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2017, 2nd ed). He edits the series The Italian List and Seagull Essays for Seagull Books.