When James Holmes shot dead twelve people and injured seventy more at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, at a screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, the response was perhaps as futile as it was entirely prescriptive: increased pressures to effect changes in legislature over the sale of firearms, renewed calls for a greater awareness over issues of mental health, and those decrying what they saw as the insidious influence of violence in mass culture. And while the first two at least present logical reflexes, both fail to reconcile the complex and subjective nature of these types of crimes. In his latest book Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi offers us a deeper more far-reaching prognosis. For Berardi, this relatively new trend (Berardi sees the Columbine massacre in 1999 as a watershed) should be read not within a narrative of isolated phenomena, as mere preventable anomaly, but as the explosive manifestations of a more widespread mutation in the realms of sensibility and subjectivity; as symptomatic, that is, of the devastating psychosocial effects of late capitalism and the sinister intrusion of neoliberal ideology into all spheres of contemporary existence.
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