Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide

Verso Books, 2015
 
What is the relationship between capitalism and mental health? In his most unsettling book to date, Franco “Bifo” Berardi embarks on an exhilarating journey through philosophy, psychoanalysis and current events, searching for the social roots of the mental malaise of our age.Spanning an array of horrors – the Aurora “Joker” killer; Anders Breivik; American school massacres; the suicide epidemic in Korea and Japan; and the recent spate of “austerity” suicides in Europe – Heroes dares to explore the darkest shadow cast by the contemporary obsession with relentless competition and hyper-connectivity. In a volume that crowns four decades of radical intellectual work, Berardi develops the psychoanalytical insights of his friend Félix Guattari and proposes dystopian irony as a strategy to disentangle ourselves from the deadly embrace of absolute capitalism.

*Franco “Bifo” Berardi, founder of the famous Radio Alice in 1976 and one of the most prominent members of Autonomia, is a theorist and media activist. His recent books in English include The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy; The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance; and After the Future.