The 2019 Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture has been announced and it is to be given by Jodi Dean!
I’m very excited about this, having spent a fair bit of time with Dean’s work on the blog over the last few weeks, but also because her influence is all over Mark’s later work.
Following Kodwo’s inaugural lecture last year, I can’t think of a better person to take on lecture number two. (There’s the possibility of another For K-Punk party afterwards as well.)
Mark Fisher is often credited for Fredric Jameson’s remark, “the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism.” It’s right that the credit go to Mark, because his account of capitalist realism confronts us with capitalism’s unbearable yet unavoidable horrors. From the genocidal destruction of settler colonialism, through industrial production’s demolition of cultures and modes of life, to planet-altering anthropogenic climate change, capital subsumes the world. We can easily imagine the end of the world because under capitalism most of us confront it, in ways conscious and unconscious, every day as we are forced to choose our exploitation, dispossession and confinement. Thinking with Mark, this talk will salvage possibilities of communist desire from the ruins of everyday life. It will focus on the end of comradeship, the different ways we lose our comrades. The fact of an end should not forestall a beginning.
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