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

160 I The SOUl at WorkThA Pni.o::.nnAri :::inl JI 11 R1discourse still produced some effects, and I believe that inbook Deleuze and Guattad developed their thoughts at aimplicitly involved the meditation that Baudrillard hadI am not saying that they replied without namingeven that they were thinking of Baudrillard when theylast book. I am simply saying that Baudrillard's critiquesame direction of the shifting tones and positions that Werience reading What is Philosophy? after Anti-Oedipus.enough to say that Anti-Oedipus is a book of youth while,years later What is Philosophy? is a book of old age. It is noteither to say that one is a book of 1968 enthusiasm, anda book of the years when the barbarians had won again. It .sary to consider the conceptual shift that took place in thismuch more deeply.The entropy of libido that Pasquinelli discusses seems toin Deleuze's and Guattari's last book once, having ao'mOlott,certain Spinozian triumphalism, we can admit that libidinalis a limited resource.The disappearance (and the return) of the eventIn the mid-1970s, in the context of the radical culture, weopposite models of imagination at work. The schizo visionthat the proliferation of desire can endlessly erode all sU'uc[urecontrol. The implosive vision sees proliferation as the UU'U" UU •. de-realizing virus. Desire is only the effect of a seductionsubject is actually a hostage, a victim."The 'molecular revolution' only represents the final stage'libetation of energy' (or of proliferation of segments, etc) up.the infinitesimal boundaries of tbe field of expansion whichbeen that of our culture. The infinitesimal attempt ofsucceeding the infinite attempt of capital. The molecularsolution succeeding the molar investment of spaces andthe social. The final sparks of the explosive system, the finalattempt to still control an energy of confines, or to shrink theconfines of energy [ . . . J so as to save the principle of expansionand of liberation.""bjecthlity implodes and in its stead we find only the terror of a.tastro",he, or the catastrophe of terror. The proliferation of simuviruseshas swallowed the event. The infinite capacity of,pli,:atiion of the recombining simulator device erases the originalitythe event. What is left is suicide.Baudrillard had already been thinking about the issue of suiinhis 1976 book, where symbolic exchange was accompanieddeath."It is at least possible to find an even match to oppose thirdordersimulacra? Is there a theory or a practice which issubversive because it is more aleatory than the system itself, anindererminate subversion which would be to the order of thecode what the revolution was to the order of political economy?Can we fight DNA? Certainly not by means of the classstruggle. Perhaps simulacra of a higher logical (or illogical)order could be invented: beyond the current third order,beyond determinacy and indeterminacy. But would they stillbe simulacra? Perhaps death and death alone, the reversibilityof death, belongs to a higher order than the code.""