Quit Everything

Franco Bifo Berardi has been once of the most provocative, influential and playful theorists of our times, since his writing started appearing in English about 15 years ago. Now as he approaches his mid-70s, he seems to be becoming increasingly depressed, a depression he associates with what he calls precaritization and the inhumanity of late capitalism. This has resulted in Quit Everything. How much you get our of reading the book will depend on how far you accept his assertion in the book's introduction that "Flight, abandonment, inaction, are the only behaviors that I consider ethically acceptable and strategically rational". Being Berardi, his range is wide and ambitious: some will argue with his diagnosis of "generalized autistic syndrome" in society in general; others will be amused by his commandeering of medical and psychological diagnoses for his own ends; still others will be irritated. My assessment is that, although Quit Everything sometimes gives the impression of an essay or article which has been over-extended to book length (with some repetitions), there is enough here to provoke us to thought and (resigned) resistance. Berardi is as ever full of acute observations and characterisations: "We must interpret depression not only as a symptom, but as an agent of subjectivation"; his image of a “Long Covid of the social mind”, and his use of the prescient work of Günther Anders and Mark Fisher are all engaging and thought-provoking.

Being Berardi, he anticipates many of these criticisms, for example in suggesting towards the end of the book that he asks young people who listen to him not to take him too seriously because his theorising is the product of a decaying brain - indeed the book can be read as an investigation of ageing from within. He also suggests that "we have finally reached the point when inactivity is more brainy (and more ethical) than activity", an observation which does not fit well with Berardi's compulsion to keep thinking and writing books like these. How you approach this apparent contradiction and his urgings towards inactivity and resignation, when resistance might be a more appropriate response, will probably colour how you receive his book. I got a lot out of it (as ever).