Thursday, April 24, 2025

What are the key points of “The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Viral Age” (Franco "Bifo" Berardi, 2021)? (ChatGPT, 2025-4-24) (自體的心理學)(車行哲學)

 Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Viral Age (2021) is a rich, poetic, and urgent meditation on the psychic consequences of digital capitalism, algorithmic control, and the COVID-19 pandemic, framed within a historical theory of three distinct “unconsciouses.” Here are the key points:





1. Three Historical Unconsciouses



Berardi outlines the evolution of the unconscious in three major phases—each corresponding to shifts in techno-political regimes:



a. The First Unconscious (Freudian) – Repressed Desire



  • Emerges with the bourgeois family and industrial society.
  • Based on repression, prohibition, and the symbolic law of the Father.
  • Sexual desire is denied expression and returns as neurosis.
  • This is the Oedipal unconscious structured like a language.




b. The Second Unconscious (Schizoanalytic/Postmodern) – Deregulated Desire



  • Emerges after 1968, with the cultural revolution and neoliberalism.
  • Repression gives way to overstimulation, and the superego becomes an injunction to enjoy.
  • The psyche becomes fragmented, overstretched, deregulated.
  • Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis capture this mutation: desire is decoded, deterritorialized.




c. The Third Unconscious (Our Present) – Depressed, Disconnected, Algorithmic



  • This is the core of Berardi’s thesis.
  • The unconscious is no longer repressed or deregulated—it is disconnected.
  • Not repressed desire, but an inability to feel—desensitization, cognitive overload, depressed affect, anxiety without object.
  • Subjectivity is flattened by algorithmic modulation, constant info-noise, and the collapse of semiotic coordinates (i.e., meaning).
  • The viral pandemic intensifies this: isolation, distance, disembodiment.



“The third unconscious is not formed through repression, but through interruption of resonance—an unconscious of autism, panic, and viral dissonance.”





2. Psychosphere and Virality



Berardi uses the concept of the psychosphere—the collective psychic atmosphere—as an ecology that has now become toxic.


  • Virality is both literal (COVID-19) and metaphorical (memes, panic, fake news).
  • The nervous system of society is short-circuited.
  • There is no collective narrative, only fragmented micro-perceptions.
  • Language no longer works as a bridge; we experience a breakdown of empathy, resonance, and rhythm.



The psychosphere is infected not by ideology, but by acceleration, automation, and dis-synchronization.





3. Pandemic as Revelation



COVID-19 is not the cause but the accelerator of an already-existing malaise:


  • The virus revealed how fragile our bodies are in a hyperconnected world.
  • It also dramatized the loss of touch, presence, and shared time.
  • Quarantine becomes a metaphor for existential disconnection in the digital age.



“The virus is not simply biological. It is epistemic. It reveals the mutation of subjectivity into interface.”





4. Algorithmic Captures and the Death of the Social



Berardi is deeply influenced by Guattari’s idea of semiocapitalism—where the economy is driven by signs, affect, and attention:


  • Algorithms replace symbolic mediation.
  • Platform capitalism engineers behavior through predictive analytics.
  • Subjectivity is no longer formed in families, schools, or politics—but by screens, interfaces, and code.
  • The social bond collapses, leaving individuals anxious, isolated, and overexposed.






5. Toward a New Sensibility: Slowness, Resonance, and Poetics



In classic Berardi fashion, the conclusion gestures not toward revolution, but aesthetic reanimation:


  • He calls for slowness, resonance, and poetic therapy.
  • The solution is not in mastering the algorithm but in reclaiming rhythm, re-establishing shared breath, resensualizing time.
  • His vision is post-cognitive: moving from semantic overload to affective reconnection.



“Poetry is the therapy for the third unconscious—not interpretation, but respiration.”





In Summary

Element

First Unconscious

Second Unconscious

Third Unconscious

Historical Era

Industrial Modernity

Postmodern Neoliberalism

Algorithmic/Platform Capitalism

Psychic Form

Repression (Freud)

Overdrive (Guattari)

Disconnection (Berardi)

Subjective Pathology

Neurosis

Hyperactivity, Borderline

Depression, Desensitization

Dominant Medium

Language

Television, Advertising

Internet, Social Media, Algorithms

Therapeutic Response

Interpretation

Expression, Creativity

Poetic Slowness, Rhythmic Resonance





Would you like a follow-up comparing The Third Unconscious to Stiegler’s The Neganthropocene, or to Han’s The Burnout Society?