The normative prescription of dystopian irony that Bifo takes on at the end seems vastly underdeveloped and somewhat tagged on as an afterthought but aside from that this is a really impressive work conveying how much of a charnel house things really are. My suggestion for others who wanna read this is to have Maurizio Bianchi’s Mectpyo Bakterium playing on loop with big wired headphones on in the dead of night - I’d imagine this would make a good pairing/double-bill with Ligotti’s Conspiracy Against the Human Race. ( )

Honestly this book deserves no more than 3 stars due to Berardi's frustrating liberal humanism, but I gave it 4 because he laid out some interesting ideas I hadn't really considered, which might help conceptualizing the present epoch.

Luisa Murano, an Italian philosopher, is cited by Berardi as describing language formation being associated with the "affective relation between the body of the learner and the body of the mother. The deep, emotional grasp on the double articulation of language, on the relation between signifier and signified in the linguistic sign, is something that is rooted in the trusted reliance on the affective body of the mother." Since early development is increasingly coming from machines as opposed to parents or other humans, the loss of empathy that might contribute to these mass shootings makes sense. I'm definitely going to chew on this for a bit. In fact, I found looked up her and found that Luisa Murano doesn't seem to have much published in English. I hope that will be remedied sometime soon.

I've heard of the concept deterritorialization before, but have never been able to get through Anti-Oedipus where it was originally elaborated, so it was nice to get a clear definition in this book. Basically, due to the subsumption of daily life in technology and the internet, the physical territory around humankind is becoming less relevant or important to us. What follows is a sense of displacement. Berardi suggests that the rise in reactionary nationalism is a response to this situation, in that people are so desperate for re-territorialization that they cling to old fictions like nationalism. Just throwing it out there...what if this is related to the rise of identity politics?

As any book about culture in the 21st century should, this one explores the Hikikomori phenomenon. What was notable to me was "most of the hikikomori persons he interviewed demonstrate independent thinking and a sense of self that the current Japanese environment could not accommodate. Meeting hikikomori persons during my own journeys in Japan, I found that they are acutely conscious that only by extricating themselves from the routine of daily life could their personal autonomy be preserved." I've had a similar analysis about the way people react to smartphones. Sure, I'm against them, the internet, and everything else, but it seems like the critique of people bringing out their smartphones in public actually compliments the hell of a physical reality around us. This section of the book reminds me of that thought.

In the last section he briefly analyzes what could be done in response to all this. Besides validating everything anarchists already do without knowing it, he talks about some confusing theoretical concept that I couldn't figure out after reading twice. Oh well.

It was a worthy read for these points and a few others. Since I've already accepted the doom-and-gloom premise, it was only mildly depressing. ( )

What most impressed me was the metaphorical density of an act that could be interpreted as breaking the separation between spectacle and real life (or real death, which is the same). I doubt that James Holmes has ever read Guy Debord. Often, people act without reading the relevant texts.

Despite the often glib treatment of the grisly, Heroes is an astonishing examination of our times. It is engaging and often raw. Semiocapitalism has arrived and folks there aren't a lot of options (read remedies), particularly the traditional ones.

Now, it is finally crystal clear: resistance is over. Capitalist absolutism will not be defeated and democracy will never be reinstated. That game is over.

Heidegger was prescient. Being, dreaming, sleeping and dwelling have all been absorbed and refigured by The Machine. We are left estranged, desperate and yet alone -- despite the common straits. I wasn't expecting to be so affected when I picked this up from the Philosophy table at the Strand. ( )