Franco «Bifo» Berardi bor i Bologna og er virksom i den italiensk Autonomia-tradisjonen. Han var tidligere en nær medarbeider av Félix Guattari og har forfattet et tyvetalls bøker. I engelsk oversettelse foreligger blant annet The Soul at Work – From Alienation to Autonomy, Semiotext(e) 2009 og After the Future, AK Press 2011.
I anledning Audiatur – festival for ny poesi 2014 utgir Audiatur også i samarbeid med Forlaget Attåt en oversettelse av Berardis bok The Uprising; On Poetry and Finance i oversettelse av Paal Bjelke Andersen. Se Opprøret: Om poesi og finans.
Utdrag fra Art and Paranoia:
I perfectly understand the state of mind of the poet the week before the Communards were slaughtered in Paris. This happened 140 years ago, and we go on repeating the same gesture again and again and again. Expectation, deception, escape.
This time should be different, after the global slaughtering that is going on worldwide after the final dissolution, after the dissolution of the Occupy movement of 2011.
A fissure is running in our perception of time, and we are trying to escape it. It is like a tectonic fault in the texture of our expectations, a deep cut in our imagination of the future.
The Modern art of politics, the rational prediction and the voluntary act of government is deprived of potency and effectiveness. For the time coming after the future we have to learn how to ride on the dynamics of an irreversible disaster with impassible soul. The art of politics has now turned into an impossible and useless exercise. We must invent a new art, the ironic art of detachment. A sceptic post-futurist ethics has to replace the modernist ethics of responsibility. Autonomous subjectivation can be only in withdrawal, desertion, abandonment.