Franco ''Bifo'' Berardi - The Soul at Work From Alienation to Autonomy

that exploits rather than represses desire-we become attached and
bound to our own unhappiness.
"Happiness" is a fragile word. In a book he wrote about Felix
Guattari, Bifo concedes that it can sound "corny and banal," to
which we might add rotten, having languished in the fetid mouths
of the planetary petit bourgeoisie long enough to be tainted for all
time. Our metaphysicians held it in contempt. Hegel identified it
with dumb immediaCy, blank as an empty page. Kant was equally
clear, founding his moral philosophy on the premise that it is better
to be worrhy of happiness than to be happy-ethics opens in the
fault between the order of value and an order of affections structured
by aesthetic textures and the contingencies of space and time.
Psychoanalysis taught us that happiness comes at a price: a tenunciation
of drives, which, far from banishing them, makes them that
much nastier, turned back against us in the guise of guilt and cruel
self-laceration. In the Grundrisse, Marx admonished Adam Smith
for confusing freedom with happiness and work with necessity, sacrifice
and suffering. This is true, he thundered, only from the
perspective of the current regime of work, wage-labor as "externally
forced labor." But if work is for us sacrifice, it can one day be "selfrealization)}
the construction and mastery of one's own conditions
of existence, freedom as self-objectification, the making of a world
as the production of the self itself. In a society in which work is no
longer organized by a small clique which has monopolized the
means of production through violence, crime and economic reason,
work will become seductive. Labor will be attractive, says
Marx following Fourier, because it is no longer work at all but its
negation and overcoming, the accumulation of joy and the collective
composition of a commons. Such pleasure will not be mete
play or, God forbid, "fun," but what Marx calls "damned seriousness":
e
"R ally free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely
damned seriousness the most intense exertion runthe
most
drisse, p. 611; my italics).
oles of autonomy whete what Marx calls the "individual's selfp
'
. "(G
. .
The task of the communism to come is the constitutIon of
I'
.
rea lzatlOn
" and Bifo calls "happy singularizations" becom shared
possibilities. The contempotary regime of work has produced a
perfect inversion of the scenario Marx proJects-work has become
the site of libidinal investment, but produces pathologies and
.
depression rather than the damned serious practice of happmess.
.
The creation of zones of therapeutic contagion reqUlreS not only a
defection from the atchaic form of the wage-in which we still pretend
to measure value with the time of work-but undertaking a
labot on ourselves, a working through of out attachment to work.
The great epoch of the refusal of work requited that we go on the
ffensive against outselves, that the proletariat destroY·itself as a
o f '
class, as labor-power. Today, we are told, this politicS 0 destructiOn
is replaced by a therapy that is primarily aesthetic in nature: the
composition of a refrain that constitutes a territory subtracted from
the social factory and its temporalities and rhythms. For Marx, the
privileged example of really free working-happiness itself-is
('composition," the construction of the communist score. Now e
know: the aesthetic paradigm of the communism to come Will
consist in the singularization and elaboration of forms-of-life, a
communism whose song will free the space in which it resonates,
and spreads.
- Jason Smith