A stimulating and profound portrayal of the epochal event that has already left its mark on the twenty-first century. Immunodemocracy offers a stimulating and profound portrayal of the epochal event that has already left its mark on the twenty-first century. Moving from the ecological question to the rule of experts, from the state of exception to immunitarian democracy, from rule by fear to the contagion of conspiracy theory, from forced distancing to digital control, Donatella Di Cesare examines how existence is already changing--and what its future political effects may be. In her own personal style, the author reconstructs the dramatic phases of what she calls "the breathing catastrophe." Coronavirus is a sovereign virus that skirts its way around the walls of patriotism and the sovereignists' imperious frontiers. And it reveals in all its terrible crudeness the immunitarian logic that excludes the weakest and hits the poorest. The Cordon sanitaire of disengagement risks expanding beyond all proportion. The disparity between the protected and the helpless--a challenge to any idea of justice--has never been so blatant. The virus has not introduced, but merely brought out into the open the ruthlessness of the capitalism that is now wrapping us in its devastating spiral, in its compulsive, asphyxial vortex. Is it our final warning? The violent global pandemic shows that it is impossible for us to survive if we don't help each other. We will need to protect ourselves from protection and the specter of absolute immunization. When breathing can no longer be taken for granted, we need to rethink a new way of living together.

A stimulating and profound portrayal of the epochal event that has already left its mark on the twenty-first century. Immunodemocracy offers a stimulating and profound portrayal of the epochal event that has already left its mark on the twenty-first century. Moving from the ecological question to the rule of experts, from the state of exception to immunitarian democracy, from rule by fear to the contagion of conspiracy theory, from forced distancing to digital control, Donatella Di Cesare examines how existence is already changing--and what its future political effects may be. In her own personal style, the author reconstructs the dramatic phases of what she calls "the breathing catastrophe." Coronavirus is a sovereign virus that skirts its way around the walls of patriotism and the sovereignists' imperious frontiers. And it reveals in all its terrible crudeness the immunitarian logic that excludes the weakest and hits the poorest. The Cordon sanitaire of disengagement risks expanding beyond all proportion. The disparity between the protected and the helpless--a challenge to any idea of justice--has never been so blatant. The virus has not introduced, but merely brought out into the open the ruthlessness of the capitalism that is now wrapping us in its devastating spiral, in its compulsive, asphyxial vortex. Is it our final warning? The violent global pandemic shows that it is impossible for us to survive if we don't help each other. We will need to protect ourselves from protection and the specter of absolute immunization. When breathing can no longer be taken for granted, we need to rethink a new way of living together.

As capitalism triumphs on the ruins of utopias and faith in progress fades, revolts are breaking out everywhere. From London to Hong Kong and from Buenos Aires to Beirut, protests flare up, in some cases spreading like wildfire, in other cases petering out and reigniting elsewhere. Not even the pandemic has been able to stop them: as many were reflecting on the loss of public space, the fuse of a fresh explosion was lit in Minneapolis with the brutal murder of George Floyd. We are living in an age of revolt. But what is revolt? It would be a mistake to think of it as simply an explosion of anger, a spontaneous and irrational outburst, as it is often portrayed in the media. Exploding anger is not a bolt from the blue but a symptom of a social order in which the sovereignty of the state has imposed itself as the sole condition of order. Revolt challenges the sovereignty of the state, whether it is democratic or despotic, exposing the violence that underpins it. Revolt upsets the agenda of power, interrupts time, throws history into disarray. The time of revolt, discontinuous and intermittent, is also a revolt of time, an anarchic transition to a space of time that disengages itself from the architecture of politics. This brilliant reflection on the nature and significance of revolt will be of interest to students of politics and philosophy and to anyone concerned with the key questions of politics today.

Every aspect of the pandemic was said to be ‘total,’ absolute, and undiscriminating. Its very name implied as much. The virus was everywhere, and a threat to us all. In Philosophy, Biopolitics, and the Virus: The Elision of an Alternative, Michael Lewis identifies three moments within the pandemic that were conceived in such a monolithic way: (1) ‘The Science,’ which had to be unanimous if it was to assume a sovereign role, and to have us ‘follow’ it; (2) ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions,’ which were regarded as the only possible response, without which death and disease would ‘run riot’; and (3) the one sole remedy that could bring about the promised end of the restrictions, to the exclusion of every other conception of medicine, treatment, and care. In each case of seeming universality, dissent immediately identifies you as a friend of the virus. And yet if all of these cases have been revealing their counterproductivity ever since, what are we to make of the elision of alternatives? Is it part of a more general tendency to thrust the questioning of hegemonic notions to the margins of respectable discourse, inhabited solely by the mad, bad, and dangerous to know?

On the internet's transformation from communication tool to computational infrastructure. The internet is no more. If it still exists, it does so only as a residual technology, still effective in the present but less intelligible as such. After nearly two decades and a couple of financial crises, it has become the almost imperceptible background of today’s Corporate Platform Complex (CPC)—a pervasive planetary technological infrastructure that meshes communication with computation. In the essays collected in this book, written mostly between the mid-2000s and the late 2010s, Tiziana Terranova bears witness to this monstrous transformation. Mobilizing theories of cognitive capitalism, neo-monadology, and sympathetic cooperation, considering ideas such as the attention economy and its psychopathologies, and evoking the relation between algorithmic automation and the Common, she provides real-time takes on the mutations that have changed the technological, cultural, and economic ethos of the Internet. Mostly conceived, elaborated, and discussed in collective activist spaces, After the Internet is neither apocalyptic lamentation nor melancholic “rise and fall” story of betrayed great expectations. On the contrary, it looks within the folds of the recent past to unfold the potential futurities that the post-digital computational present still entails.

The increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, and the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere: an essay on poetical therapy. Since the hopeful days of the Occupy movement, many things have changed in the respiration of the world, and we have entered a cycle of spasm, despair, and chaos. Breathing is a book about the increasingly chaotic rhythm of our respiration, about the sense of suffocation that grows everywhere. “I can't breathe.” These words panted by Eric Garner before dying, strangled by a police officer on the streets of Staten Island, capture perfectly catching the overall sentiment of our time. In Breathing, Franco "Bifo" Berardi comes back to the subject that was the core of his 2011 book, The Uprising: the place of poetry in the relations between language, capital, and possibility. In The Uprising, he focuses on poetry as an anticipation of the trend toward abstraction that led to the present form of financial capitalism. In Breathing, he tries to envision poetry as the excess of the field of signification, as the premonition of a possible harmony inscribed in the present chaos. The Uprising was a genealogical diagnosis. Breathing is an essay on poetical therapy. How we deal with chaos, as we know that those who fight against chaos will be defeated, because chaos feeds upon war? How do we deal with suffocation? Is there a way out from the corpse of financial capitalism?

In this incisive book, André Duarte examines the health crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the contemporary crisis of democracy. Reflecting on President Jair Bolsonaro’s misgovernment of Brazil, as evidenced by his political actions, speeches and omissions from March 2020 to September 2021, and using concepts like biopolitics, neoliberalism and necropolitics, Duarte proposes three interrelated hypotheses to demonstrate Bolsonaro's sharp distrust of democracy. First, that Bolsonaro’s rhetoric, actions and omissions during the first year and a half of the pandemic revealed a dangerous mixture of biopolitical, neoliberal and necropolitical governmentality strategies. Second, that the pandemic in Brazil intensified the damaging side-effects against democracy brought by neoliberalism and biopolitics, once the necropolitical vector assumed precedence. And third, that Bolsonaro’s political agenda is either to revoke the Brazilian democracy by violent means or to implement a façade democracy by slowly distorting it from within, blurring the differences between democracy and authoritarianism. Conceptualizing democracy as power of the demos and not exclusively as a political regime organized around a definite set of political institutions, Duarte argues that Bolsonaro's misgovernment of Brazil is related to his antidemocratic viewpoints. Pandemic and Crisis of Democracy is an important book for researchers, students, and anyone concerned about the dangers that surround the democratic experience in the contemporary world.