Volt invites you to a reading circle, dialogue and discussion related to texts by Mark Fisher. Introduction by Susanne Christensen.
Mark Fisher was a writer, critic and culture theorist. He taught at Goldsmiths in London and wrote about music and popular culture and in the blog k-punk. He published texts in among other places The Wire, The Guardian, The New Statesman and Sight & Sound. His own books were Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), Ghosts of My Life – Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014) and The Weird and the Eerie (2017).
The reading circle will be looking at extracts from the last essay collection The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, London 2017).
Susanne Christensen is a critic in Klassekampen and a regular columnist in Vagant. Latest book: En punkbønn (Forlaget Oktober, 2015). Lives in Copenhagen.
She writes in Klassekampen about Mark Fisher: “In the blog and in his books Fisher was an astute reader of a contemporary era he experienced through a lens typical of his (and my) generation, a generation of minds moulded by a sparkling joy of the modernist New and an increasing disappointment and profound depression over the Neoliberalist development from Thatcher onward. With the sensibility of a poet Fisher absorbed concepts and made them his own: from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida he took ‘hauntology’ and wrote about a haunted sound (the crackling sounds that imitate vinyl noise), an expression he made use of to respond to the economic recession of the age with something other than nostalgia and revivalism. From the Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi he took thoughts about the slow cancellation of the future and political depression. He launched concepts like “pulp modernism”, the moment that the ideas of modernism break into the mainstream and become popular.”
Susanne Christensen “Nifse samtidsanelser”, Klassekampen 4 March 2017.
