A review by frogwithlittlehammer
Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression by Franco Berardi

informative reflective

4.5

“Nothing is more hypocritical than liberal universalism, because the principles of freedom and human rights are only valuable for those who enjoy the required class privilege or race supremacy. The political reality is that the so-called free world uses universalism to protect its own particular interests, and it wields the universal criterion of human rights as an instrument of aggression against those who threaten the interest of the dominators. Threat, aggression, and violence are justified in the name of a universal philosophy that imperialist have systematically, violated and used for the purposes of systemic violation.”

Everything I could never explain to a therapist!!!! Bifo doesn’t know it but me and the crazy old man are linked at the noggin. I am in awe that this book exists, that all my beliefs about my (lack of) depression have at last been taken to the press. I am tired of being seen as a doomer, because I understand that the ideals of democracy and activism today have been violated past a point of logical retrieval. I am a fan of experimentation, it is the main reason for my fascination with the ideological ambition of the USSR. And as I’m reading this along side Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, I think this idea of the economic becoming undetachable from the political which is what comprises our culture, has been one insane experiment, and the most natural reaction in the world is to resign and remove and at last, tip that premier domino in the enchaînement of exoduses. 

“At a certain point, the idea that depressive psychosis is the effect of some physical disturbance or neurological dysfunction, found traction, and became hegemonic. Too little of this, and too much of that ingredient, as if it were the recipe for soup. But the human mind is not soup. The brain can be compared to soup if you want, but the emotional mind is more complicated than the already hyper-complicated soup called the brain.”

Soup’s uppppppp. Of course, the ending gets a little mad- scientist, as is par for the course for Bifo. His classic twist of pessimistic optimism, or perhaps nonchalant stoicism… something or other that leaves an achey sore feeling in my tummy. But I am walking away from the book with a stronger assurance in my praxis Marxism, which I facilitate through kissing and conversation. These are the last two last tenets of humanity (along with psychedelia and insurrection and resignation, which I haven’t been quite as active about yet.)