Chaos and the Automaton

Franco 'Bifo' Berardi

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English

University of Minnesota Press
07 May 2025

Social & political philosophy; Political ideologies

Series: e-flux

Facing real threats of extinction and futurelessness, a search for new ground on which to build projects toward emancipation.

Chaos 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 TrumpBiden 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.'

By: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi
Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 13mm
Weight: 340g
ISBN: 9781517917104
ISBN 10: 1517917107
Series: e-flux
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 07 May 2025
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Franco Berardi, aka ""Bifo,"" founder of the famous Radio Alice in Bologna and an important figure in the Italian Autonomia movement, is a writer, media theorist, and social activist.