Ghosts of My Life - Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

About the book

This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carre, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.

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Quotes

After the brilliance of Capitalist Realism, Ghosts Of My Life confirms Mark Fisher's role as our greatest and most trusted navigator of these times out of joint, through all their frissons and ruptures, among all their apparitions and spectres, past, present and future. --David Peace, author of the Red Riding Quartet and Red or Dead

Mark Fisher Biography

Mark Fisher (11 July 1968 – 13 January 2017), also known under his blogging alias k-punk, was an English writer, music critic, political and cultural theorist, philosopher, and teacher based in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He initially achieved acclaim for his blogging as k-punk in the early 2000s, and was known for his writing on radical politics, music, and popular culture. Fisher published several books, including the unexpected success Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), and contributed to publications such as The Wire, Fact, New Statesman and Sight & Sound. He was also the co-founder of Zero Books, and later Repeater Books. He died by suicide in January 2017, shortly before the publication of The Weird and the Eerie (2017).

Early life and education

Fisher was born in Leicester and raised in Loughborough to working-class, conservative parents; his father was an engineer and his mother a cleaner. He attended a local comprehensive school. Fisher was formatively influenced in his youth by the post-punk music press of the late 1970s, particularly papers such as NME which crossed music with politics, film, and fiction. He was also influenced by the relationship between working class culture and football, being present at the Hillsborough disaster. Fisher earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy at Hull University (1989), and completed a PhD at the University of Warwick in 1999 titled Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction. During this time, Fisher was a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which were associated with accelerationist political thought and the work of philosophers Sadie Plant and Nick Land. There, he befriended and influenced producer Kode9, who would later found the Hyperdub record label. In the early 1990s, he also made music as part of the techno group D-Generation, releasing the 12" Entropy in the UK.After a period teaching in a further education college as a philosophy lecturer, Fisher began his blog on cultural theory, k-punk, in 2003. Music critic Simon Reynolds described it as "a one-man magazine superior to most magazines in Britain" and as the central hub of a "constellation of blogs" in which popular culture, music, film, politics, and critical theory were discussed in tandem by journalists, academics, and colleagues. Vice magazine later described his writing on k-punk as "lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets". Fisher used the blog as a more flexible, generative venue for writing, a respite from the frameworks and expectations of academic writing. Fisher also co-founded the message board Dissensus with writer Matt Ingram.

Career

Subsequently, Fisher was a visiting fellow and a lecturer on Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, a commission ... Read full biography