SKIZO-MAILS by Franco Berardi Bifo

About

Skizo-Mails is a diary of the daily abyss. It is composed by messages which lead the author ' the traveller ' to understand the spasm inflicted by the dizzy motion of the vortex, and to face the speed of a frantic dynamic of the apocalypse ' or better 'Hypocalipse as he writes: revelation from below. The below decomposes / recomposes itself in the flow of cognitive capitalism ' where the crisis is structurally linked to a possible evolution of techno-mental ecology. Skizo-mails is a chronology of the current state of infoxication, which aims to keep track of the fragments towards a poetical reactivation of the social body. After exactly one year from the book last entry ' Bifo will present to the Berlin audience a performance that will focus on what happened in the meanwhile ' and what is happening right now. The drift emerged in the recent Italian elections ' and specifically the call for insolvency ' will have European consequences: the financial apparatus supremacy is no more operative. The notion of debt has a mere linguistic function and therefore it could be reversed due to a new act of language: oral transmissions and visual poetry are the core gestures of the Hypocaliptic Book Launch @ Import Projects.

Skizo-Mails by Franco Berardi Bifo is the first publication of Doormats, edited by Riccardo Benassi and Brandon LaBelle for Errant Bodies Press. Focusing on contemporary issues, events, and discourses, Doormats is a series of publications aimed at contributing to the now, talking about issues that are present and that demand presence. The Hypocaliptic Book Launch @ Import Projects will be introduced by Riccardo Benassi.

Franco Berardi Bifo is a philosopher, cultural theorist and political and media activist. Berardi was a key figure in Italy's first free radio station (Radio Alice) and the magazine A/traverso which he founded in 1975. Like many others involved with the Autonomia movement in Italy in the 1970s, Berardi fled to Paris, where he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. During the 1980s he contributed to Semiotexte (NY), Chimeree (Paris), Metropoli (Rome) and Musica 80 (Milan). In the 1990s he published Mutazione e Cyberpunk (Genoa, 1993), and more recently: Felix (London, 2008) The Soul at Work (Semiotexte, 2010) After the Future (AK Press, 2011) The Uprising (Semiotexte, 2012).

Riccardo Benassi is an artist, he grew up in Cremona (Italy), on the banks of the river Po, and currently lives and works in Berlin. He recently published Letters from the Passenger Seat with no One at the Wheel (Mousse Publishing, 2010), Briefly, Ballare (Danilo Montanari, 2012) and Attimi Fondamentali (Mousse Publishing, 2012).

Excerpt from Skizo-Mails: 'The discourse on democracy is finished. Finance capitalism and democracy are incompatible. Democracy has been eliminated and any kind of political choice based on the presupposition of the existence of democracy is, from this moment on, considered as a collaboration with the finan- cial dictatorship. We live and act within the sphere of a dictatorship that is cruel though impersonal, indeed, more cruel than impersonal. The action must thus assume the character of the exodus, of the abandonment of the space dominated by the dictatorship and by the appropriation. This is why occupation is the general form of the action. To occupy means at the same time: to perform a symbolic gesture of complaint, to put in motion a process of reactivating solidarity and reappropriating something that is necessary for survival.'