Foul Freedoms - Alberto Toscano on fascist swerves and authoritarian rule making/breaking (Exploits of Play S2E02)

RiVAL Radio

In this episode, we talked about how fascism transforms itself in and across different historical conjunctures; how the far right uses race and gender as key points of articulation and why we should be engaging with psychoanalytic theories of fascism alongside radical anti-fascist thinkers; our current moment of transition as one of systemic instability, uncertainty and reorientation; and how in the contemporary moment of resurgent fascism, migration must be thought together with carcerality, especially when deportation has become the emblem of the Trump administration. Alberto Toscano is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle, Zero Books, 2015), La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital (Palinodia, 2021), Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull, 2023), Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2023), and Communism in Philosophy: Essays on Alain Badiou and Toni Negri (Brill, 2025). He is the co-editor of the 3-volume The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (with Sara Farris, Bev Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg, SAGE, 2022), Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Abolition Geography: Essays in Liberation (with Brenna Bhandar, Verso, 2022), and Georges Bataille's Critical Essays, vols. I and II (with Benjamin Noys, Seagull, 2023 and 2025). He is series editor of Seagull Essays and The Italian List for Seagull Books, and a columnist for the magazine In These Times. He has also translated the work of Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Franco Fortini, and Furio Jesi. Against the Fascist Game is the second season of The Exploits of Play, a podcast about games and capitalism. Join host Max Haiven and producer Faye Harvey as they interview game designers, critical theorists and grassroots activists struggling with games to understand, confront and abolish the rising threat of fascism in our times. We ask questions including: how is the far-right around the world using games as platforms for ideology, recruiting and violence, both close to home and around the world? How have vicious reactionary politics emerged from a form of capitalism where most people feel trapped in an unwinnable game? What do fascism and antifascism mean today? And what role, if any do play and games have in confronting the fascist threat and creating a new world? The Exploits of Play is a production of Weird Economies, a platform for exploring the intricacies and excesses of our economic imaginaries, in cooperation with RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab.