Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher was born on 11 July 1968 in Leicester, England. He studied English literature and philosophy at the University of Hull and earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Warwick. At Warwick he was associated with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), which formed around Nick Land and Sadie Plant. His doctoral thesis, *Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction*, was published many years later. He taught for years in further and higher education and later lectured in visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

In 2003 Fisher launched the blog k-punk, where music criticism, film, television, literature and political theory met, and which helped shape a generation of left-wing writers. He also wrote for publications such as *The Wire* and *Fact*. His first standalone book was *Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?* (2009). In it he defines "capitalist realism" as a pervasive sense that capitalism is the only viable political and economic system, and that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. He shows how this mental atmosphere arises from neoliberal bureaucracy, the culture of audit and efficiency, and everyday experiences of work and education. He also treated mental distress not simply as an individual matter but as a product of social and economic conditions, and insisted on its politicization.

In *Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures* (2014) he took up the concept of "hauntology," rooted in Derrida. With it he analyzed the "slow cancellation of the future" in twenty-first-century popular culture, especially music, a culture that keeps returning nostalgically to the past instead of innovating. *The Weird and the Eerie* (2016) is his study of two aesthetic categories in literature and cinema, drawing on Freud and the concept of the uncanny.

Fisher died on 13 January 2017 at the age of 48. Collections of his writings and lectures were published posthumously, including *K-Punk* (2018) and *Postcapitalist Desire* (2021). In his unfinished project "acid communism," he sought to reclaim the emancipatory possibilities of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s for left politics.