The Second Coming

by Franco Berardi

Overview

We have entered the gateway to the apocalypse. This theological concept is the best metaphor to describe the world in which we are already living. Chaos is all around us: political folly, economical delirium, ecological catastrophe, intellectual cynicism, technological simulation of life. This is what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi suggests in this wry, dark, disconcerting but also brilliant and invigorating journey through the main events that we have witnessed in recent years.

One century after the Communist revolution, the very idea that the world could be changed for the better seems dead once and for all. Every time that a new change occurs nowadays, it seems to be a change for the worse. But the fact that nothing can save us any more shouldn’t be seen as a form of fatality or a reason for surrender. On the contrary, if our world is dead, then the space is open for another to appear – a world where apocalypse can shake us out of our zombie-like contemporary existence. The second coming of Communism will have nothing to do with 1917. Apocalypse has to be conceived of as a metaphor, and Communism is a metaphor too: the metaphor of the possible deployment of the potentials of the mind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781509534838
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	03/18/2019
Series:	Theory Redux
Pages:	140
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is a writer, philosopher, theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition.

Table of Contents

0. How to

How to deal with chaos

Not action but interpretation

Black out

1. In retrospect

Fifty years after sixty-eight

A hundred years after the Soviet revolution

Is fascism back?

2. Apocalypse

The expanding sphere of nothingness

The Empire of Chaos and the Embedded Order Guns, opioids and reason

Trumping truth in the empire of fake

Auschwitz on the beach

3. Is there life after the apocalypse?