A call to imagine a less lethal future, written against the backdrop of genocide and “fierce optimism.”
After Gaza, it is time to admit that the attempt to humanize history has failed, and that there will be no second chance. It is time to admit the failure of the experiment called "civilization"... The abyss is wide open, and we can only see it. We have to stare into the abyss, measure its breadth and depth. We have to map it, as we fall into it resoundingly.“Thinking after Gaza” means recognizing the collapse of global rationality and democracy, the human values that were the famous—and fragile—promise of modernity. But it also means searching for ways to escape the bleak future that awaits those born in this disappointing century: this century that threatens to be the last, in which thought has lost all political power, and the survival instinct struggles to resist the ferocity of military-technological extermination machines. To the generation born at the twilight of Western civilisation, we owe this intellectual workFinally, let us imagine abandoning our barbaric present, on paths that have not yet been illuminated. Thinking After Gaza, the latest essay by renowned Italian theorist of autonomy Franco “Bifo” Berardi, is a meditation on the multifaceted repercussions—political, philosophical, and civilizational—of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. The book bears honest witness to the conditions on the ground in the occupied territories, traces the “unbridled optimism” that has replaced Enlightenment ideals, and is directed not only at activists, but alsoTo peaceful philosophers, historians and theologians.
