Berardi will drag you, exhausted and terrified, across the whole history of this slow apocalypse we call civilization, and yet he always manages to send you off in the end with a strange kind of hope.

I’ve only read two of his works so far (and I will surely read more) but what I’ve noticed and what I appreciate the most in his worldview is that it all amounts to the need for solidarity with other human beings. Not just for emancipation, but more importantly, for happiness.

If Sartre said that hell is other people, Berardi says that hell is this burning desert we call modern civilization, and other people are the oases. This is the conceptual leap that our estranged, humiliated, and depressed world needs right now.