The Power of Quitting: An Interview with Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Karl Baldacchino: Your book Disertate (2023), forthcoming in English as Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression (2024), treats the subject of desertion or quitting, which according to you is congruous with the depression that is prevalent to our contemporary life. From the disaffection among the absent electorate, the wave of postpandemic resignations in Western capitalist societies, the milder viral tactic of quiet quitting at work, and the growing number of hikikomori in Japan and other Asian countries, detached attitudes are growing globally. At the same time, as the recent university-student encampments and youth climate movements indicate, many are eager to politically engage in some form of direct action. How do you perceive this concoction of attitudes?

Franco Berardi: I fully endorse the student’s mobilization against the Israeli genocide. Nevertheless, I try to understand the inmost meaning of the wave of protests against Zionism and pro-Palestine. I try to do it beyond the rhetoric of Free Palestine. Students and young people in general are horrified by the slaughtering, by the cynicism of the Zionist leadership, and this is perfectly understandable. But we must be frank about the strategic weakness of this movement. I will try to explain: when my generation demonstrated against the American war in Vietnam, we were expecting something from the Vietcong resistance: We were expecting that the Vietcong was going to open the way to a communist government and to strengthen the internationalist front of revolt against Western colonialism. Were we right? Were we wrong? This is another question. What is important is that we could identify with the Vietnamese people in terms of internationalist hope and of a socialist future. Can we say the same today? Can we identify with Hamas, or Hezbollah? Can we expect something good from Arab nationalism? Absolutely not. We know that Palestinians are oppressed; we share their suffering and their resistance. But we don’t see any future beyond the catastrophic present. Internationalism is dead, and Arab nationalism is fascist. So why are so many young people identifying themselves with the Palestinians?

Jean Baudrillard, Punto Final (1997)

KB: In the last issue of the Utopie journal in 1978, Jean Baudrillard published an important essay on the subject of silent masses and the end of the social. In it he underscored how the silent indifference of the masses is a “weapon” that needs to be further analyzed as a mode of contemporary resistance. The essay was written in the context of the postpolitical societies formed in France after the events of May, which was somewhat radically different from what was occurring in Italy, where notably a long political struggle was reaching its peak. Yet, in Italy a distinguishing type of detachment from political power was taking place, which in my opinion can be regarded as more creative and organized. I wonder then if this silent desertion has been happening for a while now and also if it has indeed been fully recuperated by capitalism on the way. Ultimately the silent masses withdrew from political life, but in doing so they conformed, or in Baudrillard’s words, “hypeconformed,” even more to the spectacle.

FB: We cannot compare what is happening now with the scenario of ’60s or the ’70s because the context is totally different. The backbone in those years was the social force of the working class and an internationalist perspective. Baudrillard was prophetic in his ability to perceive the dissolution of the social subjectivity. I read the early Baudrillard, and I felt that he was seeing something prophetic, but at the same time in the social scenario of Italy (and of France to a certain extent) social autonomy was persisting. Then came the neoliberal destruction of social solidarity and the globalization of the labor market and the prevarication of labor, and, in the end, workers were defeated and internationalism dissolved. If I speak of desertion today, it is because I think that social solidarity is out of the picture. As long as the labor market will be overwhelmed by precariousness, and competition among workers and migrants, no autonomy will be possible. I do not see any perspective of transformation of the fascist tendency that is prevailing everywhere. Therefore, we must think how to preserve our life, our existence, our social network of friendship. War is expanding, and I think that it will be an overall trend in the coming years. What can we do when war overshadows the social imagination? The only thing we can do is to desert.

KB: In an interview with Giuseppe Cocco and Maurizio Lazzarato, titled “Ruptures within Empire, the Power of Exodus,” Antonio Negri described desertion as such:

It is quite clear that desertion, exodus must be understood as a political laboratory. But it’s also clear that we are faced with a fundamental transmutation of values. The problem is to understand that the private and the public no longer signify anything at all, that they no longer are of value, that the important point is to manage to construct a ‘commons’ and that all production, all expression must be made in terms of ‘commons.’ The big problem then is that the transmutation of values must exist and must lead to a decision. However, neither the decision nor the objective can be decided presumptively. They arise from within the processes of the multitude’s transformation of the world. Or else, none of that takes place and we go backwards. A cycle of struggles had begun and it allowed us to start building our very own little war machines . . . very Deleuzian machines. It’s apparent that we have been delayed in relation to the expectations we had of this process, which has now come to a ‘stop.’ And yet, this stop, if it is thoroughly understood and mastered, paradoxically could be very powerful.

Does this align with your idea of desertion? If not, can you point any differences?

FB: Yes, I agree with the description that Negri makes of the idea of desertion. But I think that Negri has not seen the extent of the destruction produced by the neoliberal war against workers autonomy. On these lines, Negri speaks of a cycle of struggles and of a delay in the process of revolutionary movement. He did not understand that neoliberalism has destroyed the possibility of an organized subjectivity of labor. It is not a problem of the cycle of struggles; it is not a problem of delay. We have entered a totally new era in which internationalism has disappeared and solidarity has turned unthinkable because the workers movement has been broken by the force of precariousness and competition. In this conjuncture fascism has become the way of identification of the majority of the forces of labor. Identity (national, ethnic, racial, religious, and others) has replaced autonomy, and I don’t see where and when this trend can be broken because this trend is not a cycle, a phase, a short or long period of regression. This trend is the total devastation of society. What Negri never understood is the anthropological mutation produced by globalization, which goes beyond a momentary political defeat and changes forever the cognitive and psychological composition of society.

KB: In Now (2017), the Invisible Committee speaks of a “destituent” type of desertion, as opposed to Negri’s “constituent” exodus. Following Giorgio Agamben, they call for an exploration of new forms of life, which are only possible by way exercising an indifference towards elections, government, and power in general. What are your thoughts and in which camp would you situate yourself?

FB: I situate myself in the field of Agamben and of the Invisible Committee. Negri has been unable (or unwilling) to understand the radical mutation produced by the globalism, the disintegration of social subjectivity. Only from a biopolitical point of view it is possible to gauge the extent and depth of the present defeat of modern democracy. It is not a political defeat, like it was in the ’20s and ’30s of the past century. It is a mutation of the biopolitical fabric of society and a mutation of the human cognition. The basic concepts that made it possible to understand the social processes of the past centuries have lost their meaning.

Democracy has turned into the antechamber of fascism, and there will never be a democratic reversal of the biopolitical dimension of contemporary fascism. The concept of revolution has lost its meaning because it is impossible to subvert the biopolitical composition of subjectivity.

KB: A final question. If we had to take your life as an example, how would a younger version of yourself in today’s world look like? Would you quit everything and still go on to cocreate Radio Alice and A/traverso? In other words, would it be an active quitting? Or does contemporary life require a Bartleby type of withdrawal?

FB: I can affirm that A/traverso and Radio Alice have been an anticipation of my present idea of desertion. A/traverso did not conceive autonomy in terms of struggle for power, but in terms of withdrawal from the condition of exploitation. I don’t know if you happened to read some of the issues of A/traverso. For instance, in September 1977, the title of A/traverso was “Per favore NON prendere il potere” (please do not seize power). In the last issues of the magazine, we spoke of “sottrazione”, that means “subtraction”, or withdrawal. The Bolognese Autonomy was remarkably different (also opposed at times) to the groups of Autonomia organizzata (organised autonomy), just because we did not share the Leninist strategy, and we were much more interested in the creation of spaces of autonomy outside the sphere of social life, in a condition of separation. Moreover, the title of the magazine in June 1977 was: “La rivoluzione è finita abbiamo vinto” (the revolution is over, we won). This was to say: there no longer exists (and there will be no more of) the political possibility of overthrowing capitalist domination. The only strategy can be one of separation (today I would say of desertion).

This interview was conducted by email between 12/06/24 and 02/07/24

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Franco “Bifo” Berardi is a social theorist, activist and was a key figure in the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s. He is cofounder of the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and of Radio Alice, the first free radio station in Italy (1976/1978). His most recent publications are The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Viral Age (2021), The Second Coming (2019), Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (2018) and Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility  (2017).

Karl Baldacchino is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also a graduate affiliate at the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought. His research focuses primarily on political resistance, indifference, power, subjectivity, and ethics through the lens of twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Italian thought.