Bolonia, final de febrero de 2020. La ciudad está vacía y en silencio. El mundo se detiene (no para todos). Un virus desconocido prolifera en el cuerpo estresado de la humanidad global. Psicodeflación. La epidemia se entromete en las vidas, trastoca hábitos, modifica automatismos, mata viejos y asmáticos. Bifo se inquieta, pinta lienzos de colores, lee periódicos, hace radio por Internet. Y escribe: notas, apuntes, reflexiones sobre el presente en emergencia. Junto con la llegada del virus, décadas de ajuste neoliberal y dominio financiero se hacen sentir con crudeza sobre las poblaciones del planeta. La crisis se agudiza, no tiene límites. El colapso parece evidente. ¿Seremos empujados a una guerra de todos contra todos hasta la extinción de la civilización humana? ¿Lograremos, por el contrario, salir del cadáver del Capital, quizás mediante una revolución sin subjetividad ni voluntad política? ¿O se trata, más bien, de aprovechar la interrupción, de transformar el confinamiento en un proceso colectivo de autoanálisis? Lo seguro es que cruzamos un umbral: ya no hay normalidad a la que volver. ¿Podremos resistirnos a lo probable y burlar lo inevitable?
Franco "Bifo" Berardi (born 2 November 1948 in Bologna, Italy) is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition, whose work mainly focuses on the role of the media and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. Berardi has written over two dozen published books, as well as a more extensive number of essays and speeches.
Unlike orthodox Marxists, Berardi's autonomist theories draw on psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis and communication theory to show how subjectivity and desire are bound up with the functioning of the capitalism system, rather than portraying events such as the financial crisis of 2008 merely as an example of the inherently contradictory logic of capitalist accumulation. Thus, he argues against privileging labour in critique and says that "the solution to the economic difficulty of the situation cannot be solved with economic means: the solution is not economic." Human emotions and embodied communication becomes increasingly central to the production and consumption patterns that sustain capital flows in post-industrial society, and as such Berardi uses the concepts of "cognitariat" and "info labour" to analyze this psycho-social process. Among Berardi's other concerns are cultural representations and expectations about the future — from proto-Fascist Futurism to post-modern cyberpunk (1993). This represents a greater concern with ideas and cultural expectations than the determinist-materialist expression of a Marxism which is often confined to purely economic or systemic analysis.