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Communism in Philosophy. Essays on Alain Badiou and Toni Negri

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Published Aug 2025

Alberto Toscano

Author: Alberto Toscano
From the “red years” that followed the social explosion of May ’68 into the first decades of the 21st century, Alain Badiou and Toni Negri have produced two imposing and consequential bodies of philosophical writing, while never abandoning their commitment to a militant politics of equality. The essays collected in this book tackle multiple dimensions of their work—from ontology to biopolitics, from art to violence, from the theory of capitalism to the challenge of counter-revolution. But all of them are also efforts to explore and answer a single question: What does it mean to be a communist in philosophy?

Biographical Note

Alberto Toscano is the author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (2023), Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (2023), Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2017, 2nd ed) and co-editor of The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (2022). He teaches at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Communist Differend

Part 1 Alain Badiou, or, The Communist Separation

1 Communism as Separation

2 Marxism Expatriated

3 From the State to the World

4 Can Violence Be Thought?

5 The Bourgeois and the Islamist, or, The Other Subjects of Politics
1 Subjects of untruth
2 Ambivalence of the bourgeoisie
3 Justice and Terror, nihilists and renegades
4 Struggles over subjective space
5 The obscure subject of current affairs
6 Conclusion

6 Emblems and Cuts: Philosophy in and Against History

7 Politics in Pre-Political Times

8 A Spectre is Not Haunting Europe
1 The desire for the state
2  Imperium, or, the circle of the state
3 Thinking communism outside the state

9 Communism and the Absolute

Part 2 Toni Negri, or, The Communist Tendency

10 Chronicles of Insurrection: Operaismo and the Subject of Antagonism
1 Before Empire, behind the multitude
2 Tendency and communism
3 Tronti’s Copernican revolution
4 Fantasy wears boots

11 Factory, Territory, Metropolis, Empire

12 Always Already Only Now: Limits of the Biopolitical
1 Questions of method
2 Mediation is dead, long live biopolitics
3 The biopolitical subject of living labour
4 From biopolitics to class struggle and back again
5 Periodisation and production
6 Vitalism and social ontology

13 Art Against Empire

14 The Sensuous Religion of the Multitude: Aesthetics and Abstraction

15 Prison, Revolution and Counter-Revolution

16 A Communist Life: Toni Negri (1933–2023)

Note on Texts
Bibliography
Index