Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression (2024) asks whether what we often call depression might sometimes be better understood as a social and political response to a world experienced as exhausted, violent and without a credible future. His key term is “desertion”. By this he means a conscious or unconscious withdrawal of psychological energy, desire and commitment from systems that no longer appear worth investing in.

Berardi writes from the Italian autonomist Marxist tradition. He is less interested in depression as an individual diagnosis than in the social conditions that help produce widespread despair, fatigue and disengagement. He links this to precarious work, political impotence, climate breakdown, digital overload, economic pressure and the growth of the far right. His question is not simply “Why are people depressed?” but “What kind of world makes withdrawal seem rational?”

The book therefore challenges a familiar mental-health frame. If distress gets treated only as a disorder within the individual, then social causes can disappear from view. Berardi suggests that some forms of what appears to be depression may instead involve a refusal to keep investing hope and effort in social systems that seem hostile, futile or exhausted. This does not mean that clinical depression is unreal. Rather, he widens the frame so that psychic distress can also be read politically.

“Desertion” is not straightforward resignation. Berardi is interested in withdrawal as a possible form of refusal. People may leave jobs, retreat from conventional political action, abandon career goals, reduce consumption, or disengage from social expectations that once promised progress. The “Great Resignation” and the change in social rhythms during the COVID period provide examples of this larger disinvestment from established patterns of work and aspiration.

This makes the book politically ambiguous in an important way. Classical left politics often values mobilisation, solidarity and collective action. Berardi asks whether withdrawal itself can sometimes carry political meaning. If institutions seem incapable of reform and conventional forms of participation feel empty, then desertion may register a refusal to reproduce the same system.

The risk, of course, is that refusal may become isolation rather than resistance. If everyone withdraws alone, power may remain untouched. Berardi therefore treats desertion less as a finished political programme than as a symptom that needs interpretation. The central task is to ask what this loss of desire tells us about the society that produced it.

The book fits closely with other strands of recent critical theory. Like Mark Fisher, Berardi sees depression as linked to the erosion of believable futures. Like Byung-Chul Han, he treats exhaustion as a social and political condition rather than simply a private failing. All three challenge the idea that distress should be understood only through individual psychology.

A concise statement of Berardi’s argument would be:

What looks like depression may sometimes be a refusal to keep investing psychological energy in a social order that no longer offers a credible future.

That makes Quit Everything less a book about giving up than a book about asking what happens when hope itself has been exhausted.

References

Berardi, F. “Bifo”. (2024). Quit everything: Interpreting depression. Repeater Books.

Baldacchino, K. (2024, September 26). Review of Quit Everything. Critical Inquiry.