The video recording of the presentation by Franco Bifo Berardi at the Workshop during the Theaterformen festival in Brunswick (DE) on June 6, 2004. The lecture is in english.

Franco Berardi has been known as "Bifo" since he began to sign his abstract paintings at school with the name. He later became a left-wing anarchist, joining the group Potere operaio (Worker Power). In 1975 he founded the magazine "A/traverso", which became the paper of the Bologna creative movement.

In The Warrior, the Merchant and the Sage Franco Bifo Berardi argues that power is no longer grounded on consensus, but terror, ignorance and technological-economic financial and psychic automatisms, that politics is no longer able to control and that mass action is no longer able to modify or stop.

In his text Social entropy and recombination Franco Bifo Berardi states: The resurgent question of the intellectuals hides the contemporary problem of "what is to be done?", the problem of the auto-organisation of cognitive labour. Space has re-emerged for the question of the intellectuals, in the discussion of the Italian left. But the question is badly posed, and the word itself (intellectual) elaborates extremely badly the contemporary socio-mental geography.

In his book 'The Factory of Unhappiness' Franco Bifo Berardi describe a class formation, the 'cognitariat' - a conflation of cognitive worker and proletarian, working in 'so-called jobs'. A couple of years ago Matt Fuller did an interview with Bifo on these concepts.