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Depression may be described as the condition in which, no longer investing desire in daily experience, the conscious organism loses the ability to find meaning in its surrounding world. Actually, meaning does not lie in things, or in the signs of language. It is generated by the endless shift from one interpretation to the next, from the uncertain and ambiguous exchange of gestures. Desire is the energy that enables this continuous activity of interpretation. Meaning is the effect of affective communication among language agents. Since meaning emerges in the dimension of affective conjunction, the possibility of meaningful exchange rapidly dissolves when the community of bodies disaggregates. This is the starting point of depression.

— Breathing by Franco Bifo Berardi

Reality does not preexist the act of semiosis and of communication; rather, it is a construct emanating from multiple subjectivities. Those who think that the postmodern philosophers have destroyed the foundations of ethical life and of democracy by undermining faith in the factual truth are mistaking causes and effects: philosophers have not destroyed the theological ground of ethical life, they have simply announced that ethical life has no theological ground, that ethical life is a choice based on interpretation and existential sharing.

The logical sequence of cause and effect is scrambled, and the foundation of truth is forgotten. So ethical choice cannot be based on some theological certainty or some evident factual meaning. Ethical choice is based on a conflict of sensibilities, and on an ironic awareness of the relativity of our own world-simulation, of our projection of reality. The source of ethical awareness is not compliance with absolute theological or historical values, but empathic self-love that cannot be dissociated from the well-being of others.

Truth cannot be the ethical motivation of our choices, only solidarity can. The problem is that social solidarity has been jeopardized by the wide-spread precarization of labor and by the all-encompassing cult of competition. Thus political action is impotent and ineffective. Political action was once based on the possibility of choosing, deciding, and governing, but today choice is replaced by statistical prediction, decision by techno-linguistic automatisms, and government by automatic governance. The puritanical framework is broken, and baroque chaos has invaded the political scene.

— Breathing by Franco Bifo Berardi

Civilization is not crumbling, it is only diverging from civility.

— Breathing by Franco Bifo Berardi

Those with the greatest power must ultimately commit the greatest felonies. Here on The Black Cockatoo I am a flame away from forever. I told her once that we had not been fit for meaning. Neither for meaningful deaths. (There is a death whose only meaning is that it was died to defend chaos. And they are dead...) Such lives and deaths preclude significance, keep guilt from the murderer, elation from the socially beneficent hero. How do other criminals support their crimes? The hollow worlds cast up their hollow children, raised only to play or fight. Is that sufficient for winning? I have struck down one-third of the cosmos to raise up another and let one more go staggering; and I feel no sin on me. Then it must be that I am free and evil. Well, then, I am free - morning her with my laughter.

— Nova by Samuel R. Delany (Page 233 - 234)