Franco Bifo Berardi – författare

Facing real threats of extinction and futurelessness, a search for new ground on which to build projects toward emancipationChaos and the Automaton is the first volume to collect Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s extensive collaboration with e-flux, which has become one of his primary English-language publishers since 2010. The selection of key essays collected here presents Berardi’s prescient interventions into more than a decade of social turmoil, offering a tour through the cataclysms that have rocked the foundations of the global order since the 2008 financial crisis, from European austerity, Occupy, the Arab Spring, and Anonymous through the ascendance of Pope Francis, Brexit, Covid-19, the Trump–Biden sequence, the U.S. Capitol riots, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine-as well as bizarre new cultural occurrences that were consequences. Berardi draws not only from current events but also movements and figures at the firmament of his thought, such as Guattari, Pasolini, and Italian street art of the 1970s. His essays represent a sustained and singular effort to reveal the psychic and material underpinnings of a society in which history came roaring back at the same moment as any vision of a sustainable future receded from sight. “I know that it is dangerous to write in simultaneity with events that nobody can precisely foresee, that can only be vaguely intuited,” he wrote on the eve of the 2020 American elections, “but the only way to imagine something about the becoming of the psycho-sphere is to run ahead of the dynamics of the disaster.”

Facing real threats of extinction and futurelessness, a search for new ground on which to build projects toward emancipationChaos and the Automaton is the first volume to collect Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s extensive collaboration with e-flux, which has become one of his primary English-language publishers since 2010. The selection of key essays collected here presents Berardi’s prescient interventions into more than a decade of social turmoil, offering a tour through the cataclysms that have rocked the foundations of the global order since the 2008 financial crisis, from European austerity, Occupy, the Arab Spring, and Anonymous through the ascendance of Pope Francis, Brexit, Covid-19, the Trump–Biden sequence, the U.S. Capitol riots, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine-as well as bizarre new cultural occurrences that were consequences. Berardi draws not only from current events but also movements and figures at the firmament of his thought, such as Guattari, Pasolini, and Italian street art of the 1970s. His essays represent a sustained and singular effort to reveal the psychic and material underpinnings of a society in which history came roaring back at the same moment as any vision of a sustainable future receded from sight. “I know that it is dangerous to write in simultaneity with events that nobody can precisely foresee, that can only be vaguely intuited,” he wrote on the eve of the 2020 American elections, “but the only way to imagine something about the becoming of the psycho-sphere is to run ahead of the dynamics of the disaster.”

After the Future explores a century-long obsession with the concept of the "future," starting with Marinetti''s "Futurist Manifesto," tracing it through the punk movement of the early 70s, and into the media revolution of the 90s. The future, Bifo argues, has come and gone, the concept has lost its usefulness. Now it''s our responsibility to decide what comes next.

Amor, consentimiento, militancia, populismo… Encontramos estos conceptos en los medios, los discutimos compartiendo un café y los pronunciamos en nuestra intimidad, pero ¿los entendemos realmente? Su mención constante, parece, los vacía de sentido y los vuelve opacos, invisibles de habituales. En una sociedad cada vez más rápida, menos dada a la reflexión, ¿estamos a tiempo de devolverles su sentido?Durante años, Jorge Alemán y Papo Kling han trabajado por conseguirlo. Conocedores de la alianza entre diálogo y pensamiento, han orquestado conversaciones con algunos de los intelectuales más potentes del panorama hispanohablante e internacional con un objetivo: arrojar luz sobre algunos de los temas fundamentales de nuestro tiempo. En ellas, han logrado que figuras como Franco «Bifo» Berardi, Chantal Mouffe y Clara Serra, entre muchos otros, aborden el siglo XXI con una complejidad que solo el reposo de una conversación permite. Los diálogos han sido reunidos y editados por primera vez en este volumen caleidoscópico que quiere marcar el camino hacia la emancipación.Como escribe Alemán en el epílogo, «la emancipación no se presenta aquí como una meta distante, sino como un horizonte problemático, siempre en construcción y absolutamente contingente», que nos permite imaginar «una nueva forma de ser y estar en la propia existencia en el mundo que está surgiendo».