Uprising

The Uprising is an Autonomist manifesto for today's precarioustimes, and a rallying cry in the face of the catastrophic and irreversible crisis that neoliberalismand the financial sphere have established over the globe. In his newest book, Franco"Bifo" Berardi argues that the notion of economic recovery is complete mythology. Thecoming years will inevitably see new surges of protest and violence, but the old models ofresistance no longer apply. Society can either stick with the prescriptions and "rescues"that the economic and financial sectors have demanded at the expense of social happiness, culture,and the public good; or it can formulate an alternative. For Berardi, this alternative lies inunderstanding the current crisis as something more fundamental than an economic crisis: it is acrisis of the social imagination, and demands a new language by which to addressit.

This is a manifesto against the idea of growth, and against the concept ofdebt, the financial sector's two primary linguistic means of manipulating society. It is a call forexhaustion, and for resistance to the cult of energy on which today's economic free-floating marketdepends. To this end, Berardi introduces an unexpected linguistic political weapon--poetry: poetryas the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and desire, as that which cannot bereduced to information and exchanged like currency. If the protests now stirring about the world areto take shape and direction, then the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent--it will belinguistic, or will not be at all.