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

PrefaceSoul on StrikeThe soul is the clinamen of the body. It is how it falls, and whatmakes it fall in with other bodies. The soul is its gravity. This tendencyfor certain bodies to fall in with others is what constitutes aworld. The materialist tradition represented by Epicurus andLucretius proposed a worldless time in which bodies rain downthrough the plumbless void, straight down and side-by-side, untila sudden, unpredictable deviation or swerve-clinamen-leansbodies toward one another, so that they come together in a lastingway. The soul does not lie beneath the skin. It is the angle of thisswerve and what then holds these bodies together. It spaces bodies,rather than hiding within them; it is among them, their consistency,the affinity they have for one another. It is what they share in common:neither a form, nor some thing, but a rhythm, a certain wayof vibrating, a resonance. Frequency, tuning or tone.To speak of a soul at work is to move the center of gravity incontemporary debates about cognitive capitalism. The soul is notsimply the capacity for abstraction, for the subsumption of theparticular. It is an aesthetic organ as well, the exposure of thoughtto the contractions and dilations of space, to the quickening andlapsing of time. To say the soul is put to work is to affirm that the \social brain or general intellect (to use two of Marx's phrases that9