RIP Mark Fisher
I just finished reading Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire. I really appreciate the form of the lecture transcriptions from his MA art theory course. His energetic and charismatic voice really comes through and it exemplifies his unique ability to make critical theory accessible and engaging. As an insight into his pedagogy, it's a real gift. I also appreciate seeing how he himself struggled through some of the texts with his students, showing how they worked together through theory. The last lecture where they discuss Lyotard’s The Desire Called Marx is a confusing—libidinal economies, Little Girl and Old Man Marx, machinic sado-masochism, transcendence and immanence—yet rewarding whirlwind.
Though I was never a regular reader of k-punk, Fisher was still an oracular voice for me throughout my twenties, connecting and deepening my cultural, political, and theoretical interests. Though I don’t really remember, it was likely through reading his blog that I discovered Deleuze and Guattari, Hart and Negri, Žižek, et al. His work was always in the background of what I was looking at or listening to.
Finishing the book, it’s impossible not to be deeply saddened by a life cut short by suicide. The last lecture really feels like an (almost optimistic) opening as students embark on their holiday break only to come back to… nothing. It’s touching to read how people came together afterwards, but with only the remaining syllabus of the ten undelivered lectures to guide us, the feeling of incompleteness and emptiness is unavoidable.
After putting the book down, I was compelled to re-read Audre Lorde’s essay Uses of the Erotic. Lorde’s writing could not be more different from Fisher’s, yet in reading them so closely together, I felt sympathy between them. The clarity and assurance with which Lorde writes contrasts so starkly with the obscurantism of Fisher’s selected texts, the constant dialectical tensions, and his posthumously evident self-doubt. But it also reads as a salve for those wounds, as if to say “hush child, I hear you, it will all be ok…”
From anger and sadness to collective joy… from work that never ends to endless free time…