The increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, and the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere: an essay on poetical therapy.
Since the hopeful days of the Occupy movement, many things have changed in the respiration of the world, and we have entered a cycle of spasm, despair, and chaos. Breathing is a book about the increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, about the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere.
"I can't breathe." These words panted by Eric Garner before dying, strangled by a police officer on the streets of Staten Island, capture perfectly catching the overall sentiment of our time. In Breathing, Franco "Bifo" Berardi comes back to the subject that was the core of his 2011 book, The Uprising: the place of poetry in the relations between language, capital, and possibility. In The Uprising, he focuses on poetry as an anticipation of the trend toward abstraction that led to the present form of financial capitalism. In Breathing, he tries to envision poetry as the excess of the field of signification, as the premonition of a possible harmony inscribed in the present chaos.
The Uprising was a genealogical diagnosis. Breathing is an essay on poetical therapy. How we deal with chaos, as we know that those who fight against chaos will be defeated, because chaos feeds upon war? How do we deal with suffocation? Is there a way out from the corpse of financial capitalism?
Published on the occasion of the exhibition
Air de repos (Breathwork) at Capc Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux in 2024-2025.
See also
Air de repos – Breathing.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi (born 1948 in Bologna) is a philosopher, cultural theorist and political and media activist. Berardi was a key figure in Italy's first free radio station (Radio Alice) and the magazine
A/traverso which he founded in 1975. Like many others involved with the Autonomia movement in Italy in the 1970s, Berardi fled to Paris, where he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. During the 1980s he contributed to
Semiotexte (NY),
Chimeree (Paris),
Metropoli (Rome) and
Musica 80 (Milan). In the 1990s he published
Mutazione e Cyberpunk (Genoa, 1993), and more recently:
Felix (London, 2008),
The Soul at Work (Semiotexte, 2010) and
After the Future (AK Press, 2011).
See also
Art and Subjecthood – The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism.
