Enrico Monacelli has written the first review of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures for The Quietus. It’s a really lovely piece of writing that is, by turns, a personal reflection on coming into contact with Fisher’s work, the world he created through his writings, and that other world we should still be encouraged to yearned for.
You can read the full review here and find an excerpt below.
At the tail end of [the k-punk] anthology stands a fragment that disquiets the vision of a straightforwardly melancholic Fisher, a remainder of a work yet to come and of the complexities yet to be discussed. The fragment, bearing the sun stricken title Acid Communism, revolved around the constant resurrection, under various guises — be it in 1968 in Paris, in Bologna 1977, or throughout the various baroque sunbursts of the psychedelic counterculture — of the idea of an unbound abundance beyond the drudgery of late stage capitalism, an idea which felt, more than once, not only probable, but even imminent. Nonetheless, this brief piece remained, even within the comprehensive anthology, a kind of pre-Socratic fragment, the unclear trace of a project which could have been but never was, providing, also, an alibi for even more simplified rehashes of Fisher’s unfinished business.
Precisely because of this open wound, these sunken difficulties and this unexhausted potential, the recent publication of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire, his final lectures at Goldsmiths College, edited and curated by Matt Colquhoun for Repeater Books, is immensely precious. Fisher’s last lessons are so vital because they feel familiarly alien and complex within Fisher’s own body of work, extending the ever-present rupture within his posterity.
The bleeding heart of this project is the yearning for a better life, the joys and failures such yearning brings. Contrary to the emaciated ravers and McDonalds outlets that dotted the drowned London which we have accustomed ourselves to while digesting the dirges of Capitalist Realism’s lost futures, Postcapitalist Desire is inhabited by the dim, and sometimes fading, aura of the generations of workers, students, and pop superstars who dreamt of an abundance which looks at once hopelessly impossible and painfully near. It stems from a form of fun and desire which have little to do with our present umbilical turn-ons and resentments, one that speaks to us through (quoting Herbert Marcuse), “the spectre of a world which could be free”. Postcapitalist Desire is a brief and experimental reconstruction of the march of our own consciousness towards a more thorough and sincere form of enjoyment.