How to interpret the neo-fascist advance throughout the world? It’s the end? Are we facing a general depression? Where does humanity go? The Italian thinker reflected on these and other issues this afternoon Franco “Bifo” Berardiin the framework of a videoconference organized by the Whale Project carried out by the CCK: “We have to dissolve ourselves as tiny particles that participate in a process that we cannot govern but that we can feel,” he proposed.
Sunday four in the afternoon, Argentina time. In the auditorium of Kirchner Cultural Centerthe Argentine political scientist Diego Sztulwark, and on a streaming screen from Bologna, Bifo. For more than an hour, the intellectual reflected on humanity, capitalism and the pandemic. He recognized failures, diagnosed present -such as that of a generation that has deserted- and imagined possible futures: a post-human, different one. But every transformation inaugurates an end and “only if we look death in the eye can we live life as a happy life,” he considered.
From the Marxist tradition, Berardi (1949) is one of those lucid and integral thinkers – writer, philosopher and activist – who looks at processes on a global scale and dares to interpret them out loud. For him, the role of the philosopher is not to transform anything -as Marx promulgated- but “interpret the present to identify the trend towards the future”. A clear example of this position came when the pandemic broke out and his “Psychodeflation Chronicle” -gathered in the famous compilation “Wuhan Soup”- was very illuminating in the chaos of the unknown and he gave that reflection more thought in the book “The third unconscious: the psychosphere in the viral era”, published earlier this year by Caja Negra, the label that allowed its ideas to circulate in our country outside the academic sphere, through books such as “Futurability: the era of impotence and the horizon of possibility” and “Phenomenology of the end: sensitivity and connective mutation”, among others.
In this edition of the Proyecto Ballena festival, the idea was to explore the concepts of freedom and democracy, so pulled and reinterpreted by different sectors, to the point that the word “freedom” today sounds more linked to the extreme right in the media. An attribution that the left does not seem to react to. The Italian proposed, first, to think about the relationship between freedom, power and politics: “Today we clearly find ourselves with a growing limitation of the will, with a recent impotence of politics”, he diagnosed.
“Modern thought has attached an exaggerated importance to the human faculty we call the will. When we speak of freedom, we speak of a power of the will and it is thought of as a power without limits. Freedom as the possibility of doing things is determined, manifested within the space of power. Potency is the dimension in which freedom becomes possible. That means that the limitation of the human will is something that does not exist. The will is the foundation of politics in modernity. The importance we have attached to politics has been exaggerated. Today we clearly find ourselves with a growing limitation of the will, with a recent impotence of politics,” he maintained.
In his opinion, “in recent decades, after the neoliberal revolutionit has been shown a growing impotence of politics and particularly of the will. Against the techno-financial system, political action can do almost nothing; against technical automatisms, against climate change, the political will does not exist”, so that “this perception of an impotence of politics has triggered reactions that are essentially reactions of aggression, and of what we call nationalism and this return of fascism . The frustrated political will reacts aggressively to this impotence. If we continue to attribute a determining force to political will, we are going to lose everything and we are going to lose the possibility of discovering a new faculty of relationship with the other.
“Modern thought attributed an exaggerated importance to the human faculty that we call will. When we speak of freedom, we speak of a power of the will and it is thought of as a power without limits.”“Bifo” Berardi
A paradigmatic case of this reaction, which is expressed at the polls or in attacks such as the one suffered by the vice president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, is happening in your country, after the victory last September of the far-right Giorgia Meloni. Bifo warns that it is not the image we have of 20th century fascism in the “expansive” and “conquering” style (in the words of Sztulwark), it has a different nature and the Italian thinker calls it “exhaustion fascism”. .
“It is not Mussolini’s fascism; that fascism was of youth and expansion”, instead today’s is an “essentially old movement” of people over 40 years of age. “My consideration is not about the age of today’s fascists but about the horizon of today’s fascism: it is the horizon of a humanity that has exhausted its expansion. Economic growth cannot continue without the total destruction of nature, territorial expansion cannot continue without producing catastrophic wars. It seems to me that the era of futuristic fascism is over. Today we have a fascism of exhaustion, of the desperation that exhaustion is producing in the white population of the world.”
As reflected in his book “The Third Unconscious”, published in our country earlier this year, the Italian thinker focused on analyzing trauma and suffering at the current historical threshold, marked by the viral pandemic and the catastrophic collapse of capitalism giving rise to a new form of the unconscious and “metaphorical”, as he clarifies, because the unconscious has no history.
yes stop Sigmund Freud “sexual repression was necessary to develop a civilized society”, that “first interpretation -said Bifo- between the unconscious, sexuality and social life changed in the 60s and 70s during the sexual revolution and above all during the social change that was being prepared and explodes in the 80s with the affirmation of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism linked to the information acceleration of digital technology produced an effect that is the opposite of Freudian repression: it was an obligation to enjoy, to consume, to excess, to pleasure”. However, that mandate was not fulfilled because “With the increase in desire, there was a situation of constant limitation of pleasure: precariousness, work, the economy. All of this stimulated desire but made pleasure impossible.”
Bifo considers, then, that in the viral age a “third phase of the psychosphere” is entered. “Suddenly there was a destruction of social interactivity, of political, economic, sexual interaction. A fear of the body and the lips of others, we could speak of a phobic sensitization. The pandemic can pass but the trauma does not pass and continues producing effects that can be aggressive”.
The Italian thinker referred to the current phenomenon of “pandemic depression” which according to statistics would affect the new generations. Bifo does not agree with this idea and instead prefers to expand the phenomenon by linking it to others such as the fall of desire, the refusal to work and the refusal to procreate. “I don’t believe in the pandemic of depression. There is a misunderstanding. We have to understand behavior better. A depression is a drop in desire, when we invest our desire in a rhythm of life and then we fail and we can’t get what we want, the depression that Mark Fisher talks about, which is based on the feeling of a failure of ideological values, of economic expectations”. But today, assured the Italian, “it is not about a fall of desire, but about the decision not to desire anything. This is the novelty.”
“The generation that learned more words from technology than from their mother is a generation without guilt and there is a rejection of desire,” he maintained, to the extent that he understands desire as the “intensification of the rhythm of the exchange between our body, our mind and the environment, the bodies of others, nature, the future”. In his hypothesis, what does exist is “a desexualization of desire. Desire becomes hypersemiotic.”
In this line, Bifo linked two other phenomena that he identifies: on the one hand, “the refusal to work in the condition in which it is clear that it is destroying my life and the environment” and on the other in the “desertion to procreation, that dictates the behavior of women in the north of the world, including China”.
The big point would be to recognize that “we are deserting” and the new generations are doing it, those that he calls “hyper-semiotized” and have “a bitter way with desire, a generation that has understood that there is no future.” He proposed thinking about thesis such as Donna Haraway’s that “is proposing a new self-identification: we are not human, we are something else, we are particles of a nature that is thus failing from the superior point of view of the human, but is evolving in a way that we can’t understand.” The question “is how to elaborate the disappointment, the desertion that begins to manifest itself. The first thing is to recognize the disappointment, interpret the disappointment as a desertion. Politics is useless, what is useful is solidarity between deserters. And where are we going? “We don’t know, because there is no path for a walker, the path is made by walking”.
For Bifo, the power of the will faded because the world became complex: “When we speak of chaos we speak of a complexity that has become too fast for a conscious elaboration capacity. We are in a condition in which the will can each less and less and we need other posthuman faculties”. “We have to enter into a sensitive relationship with micro and macro processes that we cannot control; we have to dissolve ourselves in these processes as tiny particles that participate in a process that we cannot control but that we can feel,” he concluded.
