Tomorrow night, Thursday 8th July, at 6.45pm, cultural critic and lecturer at Goldsmiths, Alberto Toscano will talk at the ICA in London about his new book, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea.
Toscano’s book explores the critical role fanaticism played in forming modern politics and the liberal state. Tracing its development from the traumatic Peasants’ War of early sixteenth-century Germany, to contemporary Islamism, Toscano questions the sterile opposition of ‘reasonableness’ and fanaticism.
Toscano also recently wrote the preface to a new edition of Thomas Müntzer’s Sermon to the Princes:
The idea of the Schwärmer, or fanatic, as the utmost threat to the orderly reproduction of society, the one who collapses the City of God into the City of Man in an apocalyptic conflagration – an idea that has since exercised a powerful hold on Western political thought – can indeed be traced back to the early responses to Müntzer by the Wittenberg reformers, and in particular by his erstwhile interlocutors Luther and Melanchthon. (viii)
Tickets are available from the ICA site here.
