Books by Franco Berardi
Precarious Rhapsody Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-alpha Generation
Nonfiction. Criticism and Theory. Political Science. An infinite series of bifurcations: this is how we can tell the story of our life, of our loves, but also the history of revolts, defeats and restorations of order. At any given moment different paths open up in front of us, and we are continually presented with the alternative of going here or going there. Then we decide, we cut out from a set of infinite possibilities and choose a single path. But do we really choose? Is it really a question of a choice, when we go here rather than there? Is it really a choice, when masses go to shopping centers, when revolutions are transformed into massacres, when nations enter into war? It is not we who decide but the concatenations: machines for the liberation of desires and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. The fundamental bifurcation is always this one: between machines for liberating desire and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. In our time of digital mutation, technical automatisms are taking control of the social psyche.
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Facing Value: Radical Perspectives from the Arts
by Walter Benjamin, Franco Berardi, Michel Certeau
Value is an important concept in contemporary society, an immaterial force shaping the way we live together. Today, however, we seem to measure value only in terms of time and money. To reformulate value as a constitutive factor in an open and caring society requires a new way of looking that can reclaim it from the logic of capital.
Facing Value anthologizes the work of philosophers, scientists, historians, architects and economists including Walter Benjamin, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Michel de Certeau, Anthony Huberman, Charles Jencks, Siegfried Kracauer, Jan Ritsema, Viktor Shklovsky and Jan Verwoert, presenting alternative visions of value that will inspire readers to regain personal power, share energy and creativity, and build toward a vital and just society. Alternative values--like hesitation, care, giving and disconnection--are proposed as potential foci of new value systems.
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Quit Everything Interpreting Depression
Analyses the current wave of depression, or "desertion", that is causing more and more people to abandon hope and desire in a world where social, political and environment collapse seems inevitable.
Depression is rife amongst young people the world over. But what if this isn’t depression as we know it, but instead a reaction to the chaos and collapse of a seemingly unchangeable and unliveable future?
In Quit Everything, Franco Berardi argues that this “depression” is actually conscious or unconscious withdrawal of psychological energy and a dis-investment of desire that he defines instead as “desertion”. A desertion from political participation, from the daily grind of capitalism, from the brutal reality of climate collapse, and from a society which offers nothing but chaos and pain.
Berardi analyses why this desertion is on the rise and why more people are quitting everything in our age of political impotence and the rise of the far-right, asking if we can find some political hope in desertion amongst the ruins of a world on the brink of collapse.
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