heroes [franco “bifo” berardi]

Heroes is a cautionary tale for the twenty first century. The author collects accounts of those mass killers and suicide killers whose notorious stories have peppered recent decades. Breivik, John Holmes, Colombine to name but a few. He details the stories behind the actions of these young men, connecting them via a shared absence of empathy and a sociopathic disconnection from society, a concept which, the author declares, quoting Thatcher, is collapsing in the face of neo-capitalism and the internet. There are intimations of a biological-political evolution, none of which, as he points out, looks in any way like a positive step for the human race. This discursive tome also examines the syndrome of mass suicide, in India, in Japan and Korea among other countries. Again, Berardi ties this in with a sense of despair that individuals face as the very notion of society seems to implode, leaving behind nothing more than an atomised wreck of something which was once the glue that bound humanity together. The book also uses this prism as a means of understanding Islamic extremism, associating it with the anarcho-libertarianism of the US school killers and Breivik. 

This is a pugnacious, desperate book which peers into the well of nihilism and then tries to take a few steps back in the final chapter. In its analysis of the failings of democracy and the impotence of political activism, allied to the death of the utopian communist dream, it clearly presages the neo-fascism of Trump, Bolsonaro et al. As though conscious of the terrible implications of his book’s logic - for the environment, individual liberties, and even the human race - when suicidal nihilism starts to seem like a rational reaction to living in a social dystopia, Berardi seeks to row back in his final chapter, urging the reader to disavow received theories or philosophies of life. The only trouble with this is it sounds a little but like the bluster of a Trumper or a Brexiteer, urging us to ignore the experts. It also goes against the more classical humanist grain which seems to be latent in Berardi’s erudite use of culture, from Kim-Ki-Duk to Baudrillard. In the end, in spite of the author’s upbeat and engaging dialogue with the reader, and in spite of his urgings to ignore the warnings contained within the text, this is still a terrifying book, which outlines at the very least a future period of history where the very idea of the “human” as a rational, empathetic, religious animal will cease to exist, to be replaced by a body whose nerves have been cauterised and whose sensitivity destroyed. A fascist dystopia which might have been written by his near-namesake, Ballard.