This talk will explore the relevance for our present moment of a ‘tragic Marxism’ which sets out from the recognition that even or especially within the transition to communism, the contra- dictions between means and ends, individual and collective, freedom and equality, present compulsions and future tasks are intensified, and rarely allow for unproblematic, principled resolutions. This is a strand variously represented in the writings of Lenin, Lukács, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Isaac Deutscher, Raymond Williams, Lucien Goldmann, T. J. Clark and Franco Fortini. It can also draw inspiration from one of the great anti-tragic commu- nist thinkers, Brecht, namely from his intimation that we turn to the bad new things rather than the good old ones. In the un- derstanding that (the transition to) communism can be thought of as a certain collective experience of tragedy, which is to say a social and political practice of inhabiting contradictions, this paper will explore the crucial difference between emancipatory and apologetic modalities of tragic thought.

Alberto Toscano is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2010), The Theatre of Production (2006), and of the forthcoming Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle). He sits on the editorial board of Historical Materialism, and edits The Italian List for Seagull Books.