Alberto Toscano > Quotes

“The notion that capital – as an infinitely ramified system of exploitation, an abstract, intangible but overpowering logic, a process without a subject or a subject without a face – poses formidable obstacles to its representation has often been taken in a sublime or tragic key. *Vast*, beyond the powers of individual or collective cognition; *invisible*, in its fundamental forms; *overwhelming*, in its capacity to reshape space, time and matter – but unlike the sublime, or indeed the tragic, in its propensity to thwart any reaffirmation of the uniqueness and interiority of a subject. Not a shipwreck *with* a spectator, but a shipwreck *of* the spectator.”
― Alberto Toscano

“There is no path leading from the false totality of an other-directed racialised class to a renaissance of class politics, no way to turn electoral statistics and ill-designed investigations into the 'populist subject', the 'forgotten men and women', into starting points for rethinking a challenge to capital or for analysing and challenging the very foundations of fascist discourse. Any such practice will need to take its distance from the pseudo-class subject which has reared its head across the political scene.”
― Alberto Toscano