I reviewed Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s AND: Phenomenology of the End, and the review has just been published in SAGE’s The Sociological Review. My review starts:
Franco Berardi is an influential figure in the world of the arts, part of the radical protest movements in 1960s Italy, and currently teaches the social history of communication at the Accademia di belle Arti in Milan. A Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition, he worked extensively with Félix Guattari on schizoanalysis, and within this book draws upon the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Slavoj Žižek and Jean Piaget. Those familiar with Berardi’s work have criticised this book as overly repetitive of earlier ideas, but as a first time reader this offered an opportunity to engage with a contemporary overview of his work. Engaging with the dense and rather obscure language presented in the text was rather like watching The Matrix, requiring multiple single readings to gain understanding, offering new insights each time
Read the full review, as it’s open access.
