Alberto Toscano
Alberto Toscano (born 1 January 1977) is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher, and translator. He has translated the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou's "The Century" and "Logics of Worlds". He served as both editor and translator of Badiou's "Theoretical Writings" and "On Beckett". Work. Toscano's own work has been described both as an investigation of the persistence of the idea of communism in contemporary thought and a genealogical inquiry into the concept of fanaticism. He is the author of "The Theatre of Production" (2006), and his book "Fanaticism: The Uses of an  Idea" was published in 2010. Toscano has published on contemporary philosophy, politics and social theory. In an article on the Tarnac 9 case, written for "The Guardian" in December 2009, Toscano argues that society is losing its ability to distinguish between vandalism and terrorism. A reader in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, Toscano is a member of the editorial board of the journal "Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory". According to Alex Callinicos this journal "has been one of the main drivers of the academic revival of Marxism" since the mid-1990s.