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Franco Berardi

    November 2, 1949

    Franco Berardi is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist whose work focuses on the role of media and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. Moving beyond orthodox Marxist analyses of economic cycles, Berardi's theories, drawing on psychoanalysis and communication theory, explore how subjectivity and desire are intertwined with the functioning of the capitalist system. He critiques a traditional Marxist focus on labor, arguing that solutions to contemporary difficulties are not purely economic but rather involve human emotion and embodied communication. Through concepts like the "cognitariat" and "info labor," he analyzes these psycho-social processes and examines cultural representations of the future.

    The Soul at Work
    Futurability
    Ironic ethics
    Breathing
    And
    The Wretched of the Screen
    • 2024

      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.

      Quit Everything
    • 2021
    • 2019

      Breathing

      • 160 pages
      • 6 hours of reading
      4.1(252)Add rating

      The increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, and the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere: an essay on poetical therapy.

      Breathing
    • 2019

      The Second Coming

      • 140 pages
      • 5 hours of reading
      3.8(79)Add rating

      In this book, Franco Berardi guides the reader through a wry, dark, disconcerting but also brilliant and invigorating journey through the recent upheavals that we have witnessed. He argues that if our world is dead, then the space is open for another to appear - a world where apocalypse can shake us out of our contemporary zombie-like existence--

      The Second Coming
    • 2017

      We live in an age of impotence. Stuck between global war and global finance, between identity and capital, we seem to be incapable of producing that radical change that is so desperately needed. Is there still a way to disentangle ourselves from a global order that shapes our politics as well as our imagination? In his most systematic book to date, renowned Italian theorist Franco "Bifo" Berardi tackles this question through a solid yet visionary analysis of the three fundamental concepts of possibility, potency, and power. Overcoming any temptation of giving in to despair or nostalgia, Berardi proposes the notion of futurability as a way to remind us that even within the darkness of our current crisis, still lies dormant the horizon of possibility

      Futurability
    • 2015

      And

      • 352 pages
      • 13 hours of reading
      4.2(107)Add rating

      The changes taking place in our aesthetic and emotional sensibility: a deep mutation in the psychosphere, caused by semio-capitalism.

      And
    • 2012

      The Uprising

      • 176 pages
      • 7 hours of reading
      4.0(417)Add rating

      A manifesto against the concepts of growth and debt, and a call for a reinvestment in the social body.

      The Uprising
    • 2012

      The Wretched of the Screen

      • 200 pages
      • 7 hours of reading
      4.4(514)Add rating

      In Hito Steyerl's writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl's landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image. Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

      The Wretched of the Screen
    • 2011

      Ironic ethics

      • 43 pages
      • 2 hours of reading

      Berardi draws an image of contemporary Italy as "Berlusconiland," where the Italian language has been debased, and the policies of "Mafia media moguls" permeate culture like a "psychopoison."

      Ironic ethics
    • 2009

      The Soul at Work

      • 229 pages
      • 9 hours of reading
      4.0(301)Add rating

      An examination of new forms of alienation in our never-off, plugged-in culture-and a clarion call for a conspiracy of estranged people.

      The Soul at Work