Nonfiction. Criticism and Theory. Political Science. An infinite series of bifurcations: this is how we can tell the story of our life, of our loves, but also the history of revolts, defeats and restorations of order. At any given moment different paths open up in front of us, and we are continually presented with the alternative of going here or going there. Then we decide, we cut out from a set of infinite possibilities and choose a single path. But do we really choose? Is it really a question of a choice, when we go here rather than there? Is it really a choice, when masses go to shopping centers, when revolutions are transformed into massacres, when nations enter into war? It is not we who decide but the concatenations: machines for the liberation of desires and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. The fundamental bifurcation is always this one: between machines for liberating desire and mechanisms of control over the imaginary. In our time of digital mutation, technical automatisms are taking control of the social psyche.

An examination of new forms of alienation in our never-off, plugged-in culture-and a clarion call for a "conspiracy of estranged people." We can reach every point in the world but, more importantly, we can be reached from any point in the world. Privacy and its possibilities are abolished. Attention is under siege everywhere. Not silence but uninterrupted noise, not the red desert, but a cognitive space overcharged with nervous incentives to act: this is the alienation of our times... -from The Soul at Work Capital has managed to overcome the dualism of body and soul by establishing a workforce in which everything we mean by the Soul-language, creativity, affects-is mobilized for its own benefit. Industrial production put to work bodies, muscles, and arms. Now, in the sphere of digital technology and cyberculture, exploitation involves the mind, language, and emotions in order to generate value-while our bodies disappear in front of our computer screens. In this, his newest book, Franco "Bifo" Berardi-key member of the Italian Autonomist movement and a close associate of Felix Guattari-addresses these new forms of estrangement. In the philosophical landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, the Hegelian concept of alienation was used to define the harnessing of subjectivity. The estrangement of workers from their labor, the feeling of alienation they experienced, and their refusal to submit to it became the bases for a human community that remained autonomous from capital. But today a new condition of alienation has taken root in which workers commonly and voluntarily work overtime, the population is tethered to cell phones and Blackberries, debt has become a postmodern form of slavery, and antidepressants are commonly used to meet the unending pressure of production. As a result, the conditions for community have run aground and new philosophical categories are needed. The Soul at Work is a clarion call for a new collective effort to reclaim happiness. The Soul at Work is Bifo's long overdue introduction to English-speaking readers. This Semiotext(e) edition is also the book's first appearance in any language.

The changes taking place in our aesthetic and emotional sensibility: a deep mutation in the psychosphere, caused by semio-capitalism. Franco "Bifo" Berardi's newest book analyzes the contemporary changes taking place in our aesthetic and emotional sensibility-changes the author claims are the result of semio-capitalism's capturing of the inner resources of the subjective process: our experience of time, our sensibility, the way we relate to each other, and our ability to imagine a future. Precarization and fractalization of labor have provoked a deep mutation in the psychosphere, and this can be seen in the rise of psychopathologies such as post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, panic, and attention deficit disorder. Sketching out an aesthetic genealogy of capitalist globalization, Berardi shows how we have arrived at a point of such complexity in the semiotic flows of capital that we can no longer process its excessive currents of information. A swarm effect now rules: it has become impossible to say "no." Social behavior is trapped in inescapable patterns of interaction coded by techno-linguistic machines, smartphones, screens of every size, and all of these sensory and emotional devices end up destroying our organism's sensibility by submitting it to the stress of competition and acceleration. Arguing for disentanglement rather than resistance, Berardi concludes by evoking the myth of La Malinche, the daughter of a noble Aztec family. It is a tale of a translator and traitor who betrayed her own people, yet what the myth portends is the rebirth of the world from the collapse of the old.

An analysis of contemporary semio-capitalism's overloading of subjectivity, leading to a deep mutation in the psychosphere. Franco "Bifo" Berardi's newest book is an analysis of changes our aesthetic and emotional sensibility has undergone recently-all the result of semio-capitalism's capturing of the inner resources of the subjective process: our experience of time, our sensibility, our means of relating to each other, and our ability to imagine a future. The precarization and fractalization of labor today has provoked a deep mutation in the psychosphere, and this is visible in the rise of such psychopathologies as post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, panic, and attention deficit disorder. Sketching out an aesthetic genealogy of capitalist globalization, Berardi shows how we have reached a point of such complexity in the semiotic flows of capital that we can no longer process its excessive currents of information. A swarm effect now rules: it has become impossible to say "no." Social behavior is trapped in inescapable patterns of interaction coded by techno-linguistic machines, smartphones, screens of all sizes, and all of these sensory and emotional devices destroy our organism's sensibility by submitting it to the stress of competition and acceleration. Arguing for disentanglement rather than resistance, Berardi ends by evoking the myth of La Malinche, the daughter of a noble Aztec family, a translator and traitor who betrayed her own people. Yet what she portends is the rebirth of the world from the collapse of the old.

Author of "The Soul at Work" and "After the Future," Franco Berardi Bifo (born 1949) is one of today's most articulate and prominent anti-capitalism theorists. Like many others involved with the 1960s Autonomia movement in Italy (such as Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti), Berardi moved to Paris, where he worked and studied with the French philosopher and psychotherapist Felix Guattari, in the field of schizoanalysis. "Skizo-Mails" is a collection of Berardi's aphoristic and diaristic correspondence that combines the political and the poetic in its consideration of our present plight. "What invention will be able to call humans out of the abyss? Who will be able to gather thoughts and emotions and solidarity?" Berardi asks, in one letter. This publication is the first in Errant Bodies' new "Doormats" series, dedicated to rethinking the contemporary political sphere and demanding a focused and attentive presence and readership.

Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, by Franco Berardi 'Bifo', originates in the author's close personal acquaintance with Felix Guattari's writings and political engagement in the context of Berardi Bifo's activism in Italian autonomist politics and his ongoing collaboration with Guattari in the 1970s and 1980s. This biography gains distinction from its keen insight into Guattari's political practice and from a precise understanding of how this practice relates to the theoretical and conceptual aspects of Guattari's writings, alone and with Gilles Deleuze. Thanks to an approach at once personal and theoretically well informed, Bifo's biography provides a clear and accessible introduction to Guattari's works. This edition also includes a critical introduction and a 2005 interview with Bifo on a range of topics relating Guattari's works to the current political conjuncture.

A manifesto against the concepts of growth and debt, and a call for a reinvestment in the social body. The Uprising is an Autonomist manifesto for today's precarious times, and a rallying cry in the face of the catastrophic and irreversible crisis that neoliberalism and the financial sphere have established over the globe. In his newest book, Franco "Bifo" Berardi argues that the notion of economic recovery is complete mythology. The coming years will inevitably see new surges of protest and violence, but the old models of resistance no longer apply. Society can either stick with the prescriptions and "rescues" that the economic and financial sectors have demanded at the expense of social happiness, culture, and the public good; or it can formulate an alternative. For Berardi, this alternative lies in understanding the current crisis as something more fundamental than an economic crisis: it is a crisis of the social imagination, and demands a new language by which to address it. This is a manifesto against the idea of growth, and against the concept of debt, the financial sector's two primary linguistic means of manipulating society. It is a call for exhaustion, and for resistance to the cult of energy on which today's economic free-floating market depends. To this end, Berardi introduces an unexpected linguistic political weapon-poetry: poetry as the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and desire, as that which cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. If the protests now stirring about the world are to take shape and direction, then the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent-it will be linguistic, or will not be at all.

Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography, by Franco Berardi 'Bifo', originates in the author's close personal acquaintance with Felix Guattari's writings and political engagement in the context of Berardi Bifo's activism in Italian autonomist politics and his ongoing collaboration with Guattari in the 1970s and 1980s. This biography gains distinction from its keen insight into Guattari's political practice and from a precise understanding of how this practice relates to the theoretical and conceptual aspects of Guattari's writings, alone and with Gilles Deleuze. Thanks to an approach at once personal and theoretically well informed, Bifo's biography provides a clear and accessible introduction to Guattari's works. This edition also includes a critical introduction and a 2005 interview with Bifo on a range of topics relating Guattari's works to the current political conjuncture.