[logimame]

I'm currently reading Fisher's posthumous book, "Postcapitalist Desire: the Final Lectures" (lectures collected and edited by Matt Colquhoun). And it seems that many, including myself, had overlooked Fisher's whole academic project as being solely a negative endeavor, which is partially because his book "Capitalist Realism" was such a huge success and overshadowed his other writings. He was always actively trying to find strategies for a way out of capitalism, finding various kinds of desires in our current society that capitalism was not able to satisfy. I think the most important essay on this matter would be "Terminator vs Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism" (https://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32522465887/termina...), which I think solidified his position as a left-accelerationist from that point. It's kinda sad that the next well-known essay, "Exiting the Vampire's Castle", which decried the callout culture of the Left, marked the end of his activities on the Internet because of its backlash and perhaps hastened his spiral of depression. His unfinished project - "Acid Communism", might be critiqued as a nostalgic retreat to the 60s and the 70s - but I think he was doing something more subversive than that. My interpretation was that in order to imagine a society without neoliberalism, we need to reclaim the ability to remember that there was a past before neoliberalism. The tendency of postmodern culture (as critiqued by Frederic Jameson and further elaborated by Fisher) was to destroy the ability to articulate about history and time, leaving any sort of progressive change into a stagnated halt. I think his unfinished project was not about retreating to the past, but remembering the past to turn the wheels of history again. Although he may have taken his own life in 2017 (possibly after seeing a glimpse that something might come after neoliberalism, but that may be fascism instead of what he'd wanted) - I still think he died as an accelerationist and didn't succumb to the "no alternative" dogma of late capitalism.