In his Letter on Humanism Heidegger already shows how humanism is in danger: it is actually condemned by the 'beyond the human' that is implicit in the mathematization and the digitalization of knowledge of knowledge, and by the automatization of life. The will to power produced the instruments of its own end, and the end of human freedom, that is to say the quintessentially human: since human is situated in a space of freedom that technology eliminates.

It should not be inferred that Berardi meditates on Heidegger in this remarkable book. The Soul At Work is about labor, this practice of work, about the wages in which we wallow or wither. The text is also about the flux about what constitutes labor in the technological world of data and automation. This present crisis is one of Semiocapitalism: the outgrowth of our virtual economies and the prevalence of the Cognitariat - the knowledge worker and all that such entails.

Berardi begins his book with an examination of social philosophy form Hegel through the epistemological break between early and late Marx and on through Gramsci and Marcuse. The effect of such Leftist thought on the changing labor realities of the 1960s and 70s is explored. There a trio of tempests which engage burgeoning techno-realities of the 80s and 90s: Deleuze/Guattari, Foucault and Baudrillard. This is an interesting section, bubbling with thought.

Soul At Work is a much more rigorous book than Heroes, my introduction to Berradi. I am glad for his meticulous construction, though aspects remain speculation in my opinion. That said, it is refreshing to encounter the following diagnosis and prescription in these jaded times.


Society does not need more work, more jobs, more competition. On the contrary: we need a massive reduction in work-time, a prodigious liberation of life from the social factory, in order to reweave the fabric of the social relation.

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