The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Viral Age

The Unconscious knows no time, it has no before-and-after, it does not have a history of its own. Yet, it is not always the same. As it emerges in the life of people and societies, the Unconscious is shaped by ever-changing historical conditions: its form depends on the unique ‘psychosphere’ of each historical age. In the early twentieth century, Freud characterised the Unconscious as the dark side of the well-ordered framework of Progress and Reason. At the end of the past century, Deleuze and Guattari described it as a laboratory: the magmatic force that ceaselessly brings about new possibilities of imagination. Today, at a time of viral pandemics and in the midst of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism, the Unconscious has begun to emerge in yet another form. In this book, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi vividly illustrates the form in which the Unconscious will make itself manifest for decades to come, and the challenges that it will pose to our possibilities of political action, poetic imagination, and therapy.