In the Act: The Shape of Precarity Available to Purchase

Chapter 7 returns to the question of autistic perception and explores how the concept of depression expresses itself in the context of a neurodiverse account of experience. It begins with a triple account: Peter Pelbart’s story of the petrification and spark at the heart of Félix Guattari, Bifo’s (Franco Berardi) account of Guattari’s depression and the “winter years,” and Andrew Solomon’s account of the ndeup (a Senegalese ritual for depression). Foregrounding the explicit link between neurodiversity and activism, the chapter challenges Bifo’s alignment between the in-act and neoliberalism. Taking the act not simply as that which is in the service of the neoliberal economy, but more broadly as the force of the event through which minor gestures course, and taking depression out of the context of an individual sadness, the chapter explores the operative passage between petrification and spark.