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

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Fisher’s attention to aspects of daily life that might seem too boring or personal to be worthy of collective interest was, I think, propelled by an intuition that part of what sustains our acquiescence to the status quo is our inattention to it. I am interested in music, politics and culture, and discovered the very compelling albeit hard to define concept of hauntology from a keen interest in the music of Portishead, Massive Attack, Tricky and Boards of Canada, as well as the movies and TV productions of David Lynch. The single version is featured on a bonus disc issued with the box set release of the Tin Drum album in 2003.

The group appeared on Top of the Pops on 18 March 1982 when the single was at number 42 in the charts.Or maybe it’s not so dispiriting after all, because any such anthology of past writings – mea culpa, in this regard – is necessarily also a way of putting an end to a phase in your work, preparing the ground for something more exacting.

I think that was another reason why it was successful; people would still recognise the ballad within the arrangement. In contrast to the nostalgia and ironic pastiche of postmodern culture, Fisher defined hauntological art as exploring these impasses and representing a "refusal to give up on the desire for the future" and a "pining for a future that never arrived".Fisher’s writing may resonate with those who came of age in the thick of capitalist realism, and who, unlike Fisher’s generation, have no memory of social democracy, precisely because it theorises a loss they can’t remember or measure, but which they’ve nevertheless inherited. The unique pleasure in reading Fisher is that, whereas other first-rate critics – think Geoff Dyer or Brian Dillon – will generally apply a refined critical-intellectual apparatus to commensurately rarefied subjects, Fisher’s fanatical loyalty is to pop culture in its instinctively avant-garde strains. In turn this reminds us of the "hantologie" of Derrida, anglicised by Mr Fisher under the name of "hauntology". It has to be said that Mr Fisher works through these ideas with some determination and rigour, and they largely succeeds in proving his case. When the cultural critic and theorist Mark Fisher took his own life on 13 January 2017 at the age of 48, he was a third of a way through delivering a lecture series titled “Postcapitalist Desire”, which he had devised as part of an MA course in contemporary art theory at Goldsmiths, University of London.