Karl Baldacchino reviews Quit Everything

Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression. London: Repeater Books, 2024. 201 pp.

26 September 2024

In a peculiar 1978 essay, as if to taunt the memory of the events of May that occurred precisely a decade earlier, Jean Baudrillard explicitly suggested that critical thought must start to analyse the attitude of indifference “in its positive brutality,” rather than always dismissing it as mere “alienation which always turns the multitudes away from their revolutionary vocation.”[1] In his signature ironic tone, he then insisted that “banality, inertia, apoliticism used to be fascist” but are now “in the process of becoming revolutionary.”[2] In a similar vein, in Quit Everything, the veteran Autonomia theorist, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, suggests a “different interpretation of depression, of passivity, of exhaustion” (p. 2).

In contrast to Baudrillard’s vision of accelerating capital flows in the hope of the destruction of the social, Berardi advocates a sort of deceleration, which he frames through the notion of desertion or quitting. Desertion here is understood less in physical terms than the desertion of a particular way of being. According to Berardi, deserting is necessary since the young “precarious generation” are severely discontented with being “forced to constantly accelerate the rhythm of the nervous reaction to info-stimuli” (p. 23). In the face of multiple global crises, from pandemics to wars, economic uncertainties and the climate collapse, Berardi asserts that we are forced “to imagine the events to come from the perspective not of expansion, but of exhaustion and contraction” (p. 4). In practice, he notes how this attitude of “resignation to extinction,” which “paradoxically may turn out to be the only way out of extinction,” is already noticeable in the “mass repudiation of procreation, work, consumption, and participation” (p. 155). Berardi anticipates that in the coming future, all quitting behaviours are going to be part of an “unstoppable trend” geared towards “non-involvement: that is, towards autonomy” (p. 151).

In contemporary Italian thought, the notion of deserting is hardly a new concept. Some notable examples include Antonio Negri’s constituent notion of exodus and Paolo Virno’s similar thought on the possibility of an exit, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s distinguishable idea of potential inoperative forms of life. Berardi’s contribution joins in this tradition to insist that in the age of “ethical catastrophe,” desertion “is the most radical form of class struggle” and the only one “that may have a chance of success today” (pp. 68, 7). Yet Berardi’s novel take on desertion is specifically concerned with how he interprets it through “the message we may disentangle from depressive symptoms” (p. 109). Reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s reinterpretation of schizophrenia as a revolutionary line of escape, Berardi urges us to “consider depression as a form of knowledge,” as it might as well not ‘be a disorder, but a pathway to a different cure’ (pp. 109, 113). For instance, the spate of exhausted workers’ resignations in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic might need to be understood more from the lens of how many were exposed to a much slower way of living, and therefore to the “possibility of withdrawal” (p. 127).

While appealing for the serious rethinking of “the psycho-political problem of depression as a creative resignation,” towards the end of the book, an age-conscious Berardi insists not to be taken too seriously, and if possible, to read him ‘with a smile of ironic pity’ (pp. 112, 196). Irrespective of how Berardi is read, his analysis will almost certainly critically engage anyone interested in contemporary social theory, activists and artists interested in social change, as well as mental health and self-care advocates. However, for those familiar with Berardi's previous works, Quit Everything can indeed feel familiar as it revisits many of the themes the author previously treated. Furthermore, at the current conjuncture, notably tainted by the resurgence of new and old fascist tendencies and desires, the text remains vague on how to tackle the power vacuums that our lines of quitting might create. Then again, if in Michel Foucault’s words one had to counter “the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us,” deserting one’s habitual being might mean you are already one step ahead.[3]

[1] Jean Baudrillard, "In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities," in In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Or the End of the Social, and Other Essays, trans. Paul Foss et al. (New York, 1983), p. 13.

[2] Ibid., p. 40.

[3] Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis, 2007), p. xiii.