WAR, INSUBMISSION, ART

Terminal imagination

• Photo by Emiliano Ron

  
  

  In our experience of political imagination there is a premise we never question: the premise that the human species has a future, that the future of the human species is in some way eternal.
  It is a premise we cannot prove scientifically. On the contrary, one could say that the eternity of civilization and of the human species is highly unlikely from a scientific point of view.
  Analyzing the history of the last century, the aesthetic and cultural imagination of our time, I have decided to formulate a hypothesis different from the one we always accept without discussion.
  I have decided to start from the hypothesis that the century we live in is the last in human history. I dare to say that the civilization we call human is already collapsing — that the genocide in Gaza is proof of a definitive collapse of civilization. Moreover, I am interested in the hypothesis that the human species, as a biological reality, is destined to disappear as a consequence of the end of the civilization that allowed the survival of the civilized animal.
  My problem is the following: my friends and comrades take me seriously, and criticize me from a political point of view. I am not in the least interested in the political reading of what I am thinking, since I do not believe that political will still has the decisive role it had in the past modern age. I do not take myself seriously and allow myself to reflect on an extreme hypothesis without caring about its political implications.

  One: dystopia as post-political art

  Only writers of dystopian science fiction were able to predict the precipice into which planet Earth has plunged. Therefore, I have decided to adopt the perspective of a dystopian utopia: it seems to me the only way to understand contemporary events and imagine their evolution in the twenty-first century: climate apocalypse, global war tending toward the nuclear, rapid ageing of the world population and rapid depopulation of the planet, while the automaton proliferates.
  I do not think it makes sense to repeat the political rituals of the last century: democracy has been erased, rights trampled, the left has paved the way for contemporary Nazism, and deserves only to disappear.
  What interests me, therefore, is to interpret the signs of the psychosphere, read its tendencies and search for escape routes from the abyss that surrounds us.
  Naturally I hope no one takes me too seriously; I hope that whoever chooses to read me does so in the same spirit with which we once read Octavia Butler or Philip Dick.
  It is the best way to understand why Nazi-liberal racism has taken power in the West and why there is no longer any viable political route to reverse this situation.
  Humanity no longer exists; what continues to exist is the human species. Imagining how we will live among humans without humanity is the imaginative — and perhaps also political — action that seems urgent to me.

  Two - symbiosis

  The symbiosis of the human brain with the automaton is the spectacle that promises to fill the twenty-first century.
  Humanity is deciding not to reproduce. The figures of this rapid self-elimination can be found in the article Humanity will shrink, far sooner than you think (Economist, September 11 2025).
  Reproductive sexuality tends to disappear from the habits of the human animal; an ever-increasing number of women reject procreation with horror, unwilling to give birth to victims of climatic and military hell. Moreover, male fertility is drastically reduced by microplastic contamination, which has altered hormonal communication in the human body.
  The inversion of desire is now directed in two directions: on one hand, it is a purely semiotic desire, the expectation of an electronic and dopamine discharge. On the other, it is the desire to inflict pain on another’s body and on one’s own. A desire for violence, aggression, extermination, compensation for social and sexual frustration.
  But at the same time, the automaton is draining the mental energies that once belonged to us, learning to reproduce itself, correct itself and improve itself.

  Three - neuro-stimulant proliferation

  Bombarded by the proliferation of info-neural stimuli, the organic brain loses its capacity for coordination.
  Senile marasmus manifests as massive depression or alternatively as white terror.
  At the same time, however, the artificial brain gains ever more capacity for efficiency and functionality.
  The artificial brain possesses computational intelligence and is not burdened by consciousness: therefore it is faster, more rational and more relentless. The automaton possesses the cognitive virtues once held by humans and has freed itself from sensitivity: it does not suffer, does not enjoy, does not ask too many questions.
  We can only wish it good luck. It has already won.
  But in the meantime, while we wait for humans to go extinct and robots to take over the planet, how will we live?

  Four - the post-discursive dimension

  Is politics still effective in the era of post-discursive functioning of the collective mind?
  Democracy is (was) the management of social life based on consensus, and consensus presupposes the rational regulation of discourse. But experience tells us that regulation has exploded, and as a consequence democracy has disappeared.
  Likewise international law ceases to be valid when ferocity is unleashed, when social relations are no longer governed by law but by power relations without legal mediation.
  The acceleration of the semiotic flow and the multiplication of neuro-informational stimuli prevent the possibility of rational interpretation and the possibility of sharing meaning.
  As a consequence the possibility of building consensus dissolves. Critical reason was based on sequential interpretation of signs and the discrimination between true and false, between good and evil. Critical interpretation fades in the regime of infinite acceleration of the infosphere.
  Politics, the exercise of persuasion, becomes useless when ideological or political persuasion is replaced by semiotic penetration.

  Five - ferocity

  This is why we have entered the dimension of ferocity, the animal instinct that implies the elimination of the other's body in the name of one’s own survival. Domination is no longer built as a discursive effect, but as an effect of fascination, hallucination or terror. If ferocity animates the action of power, cruelty dominates the sphere of imagination.
  Ferocity is the annihilation of the other for the sake of the same: the Israeli genocide is proof of the prevalence of ferocity in relations between peoples.
  But the ferocity of power implies and promotes cruelty in the social imaginary. If ferocity consists in inflicting pain and humiliation on the other for the benefit of one’s own body, cruelty is the desire for the pain of the other without benefit to one’s own body.
  If ferocity is the economy of survival, cruelty is gratuitous and responds to a psycho-aesthetic stripped of the ethical filter of shared sensibility. Cruelty exerts a strong attraction over the post-critical unconscious of a generation that has lost the ability to distinguish between virtual fiction and the reality of physical bodies.

  Six - an ocean of pain

  If politics has lost its practical efficacy and its capacity to interpret social events, then let us ask what has become of psychoanalysis.
  I do not believe psychoanalysis is of much use in healing the pain that spreads everywhere like a threatening river, fed by the ferocity of humiliated peoples. Little remains of the civilizational malaise Freud spoke of. Where once individual neurosis slid, now grows the monstrous shadow of homicidal psychosis, and as Ferenczi said in 1919, psychoanalysis does not know what to do in the face of mass psychosis.
  The mind of the generation that continuously receives info-neural stimuli and no longer has time to listen to its own unconscious has little in common with the mind that formed across ten thousand years of human history.
  Father, mother, brother, the future, sex, dreams and the night no longer have the same face they had for millennia.
  To cure the epidemic of depression, to cure connective loneliness, today the cure of violence, aggression and fascism spreads.
  Despite everything, although it seems to me incapable of healing the ocean of pain that engulfs us, psychoanalysis remains useful for understanding what happened and what is still happening. And perhaps also for dismantling the machinery of inhumanity.

  Seven - crisis of supremacy and reactionary dementia

  More than sociopolitical analysis, the analysis of the psychosphere can explain part of the syndrome of cruelty. White supremacy is entering an extreme crisis because of population ageing, the decline of psychophysical energy and the spread of dementia.
  The sadism of power is based on this desperate reaction to exhaustion and impotence. Therefore we witness the deployment of sadistic violence in every corner of the planet. The evidence is the racist campaign of capture, detention and deportation of Latinos in North American cities. The evidence is the genocide perpetrated by the Nazi-Zionists.
  The articulation of sadistic exhibitionism and social conformism is fundamental in the formation of the psychopower of our time.

  Eight - interwhite war

  The forces that feed white terror are destined to devour one another. The interwhite war between dying liberal democracies and unrestrained psycho-fascists is destined to tear the West apart.
  The war in Ukraine tends to spread across the entire European continent. Rearmament will destroy the social life of the old continent. After devastating and looting Ukraine, after killing hundreds of thousands of men (we will never know how many), the interwhite war in Ukraine is destined to corrode the very body of the senescent continent.
  In Israel, suicide is rampant among soldiers, especially after completing military service. Horror has filled their minds, and sooner or later this suicidal syndrome will become dominant in the fully Nazified country.
  The United States is technically under a military dictatorship, and civil war is destined to spread into everyday life, with increasing random shootings, rising deaths from fentanyl and heroin…
  Trumpism, a desperate attempt to save white hegemony, cannot subjugate the coalition of authoritarian regimes growing in the global south: a global war is being prepared with Russia playing the role of wildcard, a white power excluded from Western domination.

  Nine - Must we then wait for disintegration to do its work? Is there nothing else we can do?

  How can we protect the generation growing up under conditions of devastation, at the edge of madness, at the edge of the final war?
  I have no political answer to these questions.
  My answer is only this (enigmatic one): only madness can have any effect on the demented mind and the exhausted body of humanity on the brink of extinction.

  Bifo's latest book will be on sale on the day of the presentation, in the venue.
  Thinking After Gaza
  An essay on the ferocity and the extinction of the human by Franco Berardi (Bifo)

  Después de Gaza, África 50: Franco Berardi “Bifo” y René Vautier from El Salto