An interview with Franco “Bifo” Berardi on the Paris Commune of 1871 and its present resonances.
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Tag: Franco “Bifo” Berardi
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi: Extinction, Rebellion, Happiness
Ill Will Editions wrote to Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi to ask him what lessons the 1970s Autonomia movement had for our current struggles. His answer? Very little. In this essay, Bifo proposes we rethink autonomy from within the new horizon: that of our own extinction.
Continue reading Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi: Extinction, Rebellion, Happiness“Don’t talk just kiss” – Franco “Bifo” Berardi: The struggle for new subjectivities
On September 9, Franco “Bifo” Berardi affirmed in a public Zoom organised by the Untref [Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero] that politics had died. He was referring to politics as the belief that the will can create new collective projects and transform structures (extant between Machiavelli and Lenin). We are witnessing, he said, the collapse of the aggressive and long dominant white, male, colonial, capitalist mind (and politics seems to die with that culture). According to him, then, it is time to start from another place: from the poetic, the erotic and the right to defend new ways of life, to depart from the rotten corpse of capitalism. This is beautiful: the beauty of Bifo as the somatic luminous prophet of darkness shines in this reasoning with particular force. As he writes in a recent book: as the old people of the north die (and the fascism that beset us), we must create spaces for the new lives in danger, that of the young people of the south.
Continue reading “Don’t talk just kiss” – Franco “Bifo” Berardi: The struggle for new subjectivitiesFranco ‘Bifo’ Berardi: Pandemic and the reset of the global machine
The 2020 pandemic has reactivated the future as a space of possibility, prompting us to envisage new non-centralized forms of political action and social relations, argues Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi.
Continue reading Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi: Pandemic and the reset of the global machineFranco “Bifo” Berardi: “We are entering the age of extinction”
Politics in times of madness: Franco “Bifo” Berardi
Psychosis: A severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.
It is unclear whether the metaphor of being in “touch with reality” is adequate to understand human life in general, or human social and political life more particularly. And if it is flawed, then to read contemporary politics as “psychotic”, in contrast to a presumably “rational” politics of bygone days, is itself problematic. Have we not always been at war, socially, or have not societies always been constituted by the temporary balance of contending forces and worlds? If so, then Bifo’s brief reading of our times, which we share below, may be of limited importance. But it is by no means without interest and invites further reflection.
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