Volume 3 issue 1 May 2015
Fanaticism, Politics and the Subject of Justice: An Interview with Alberto Toscano
Ozan Kamiloglu
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Alberto Toscano is a social theorist, philosopher and teaches in the Sociology department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles on political philosophy and social theory, and his most recent title at the time of the interview was Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea. In this timely work, Toscano undertakes a detailed history of religious and secular fanatics, challenging the constructed opposition between the reasonable and the fanatic and placing fanaticism at the heart of politics. His focus on the conjunction between the refusal to compromise and the concomitant drive towards the universal provides an innovative reframing of contemporary politics and debates on secularism and faith. Simultaneously, Toscano invites his reader to travel through classic texts by Kant, Hegel, Marx and Burke, to Sigmund Freud, Ernst Bloch and Alain Badiou. In this broad interview Toscano considers a variety of interconnected though disparate topics, ranging from social classes and Marxism to the nature of law and philosophy. The relations between the concepts of justice, law and philosophy are examined with the help of a genealogy of different philosophical traditions prevalent in France and the UK. His journey through this complex theoretical terrain is rooted in a profound under¬standing of philosophy and provides a courageous and often surprising look at the subject, connecting a critique of liberalism—so present in his work—to the correspondence between justice, philosophy and crisis in different countries. The Birkbeck Law Review is extremely happy to present this rich and insightful text to our readers.
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