The Greek translation of Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie is out now, translated by Alexandros Papageorgiou and published by Antipodes.
I have written a brand-new preface to this edition, exploring some of the book’s most significant references, beginning with speculative realism and that fleeting movement’s interest in H.P. Lovecraft, before moving onto other discussions had on the blogosphere when many of the book’s chapters were initially drafted. I explore the book’s relationship to Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, the influence of Badiou and Žižek on Fisher’s thought at this time, and his interest in Lacan.
“Every truth has the structure of fiction”, Lacan argued in Seminar VII. It was Fisher’s chosen task, with this “most gnomic and provocative formulation” in mind, to follow both of the paths illuminated by Badiou and Žižek in the mid-2000s. As Fisher wrote on his k-punk blog in 2005: “For Badiou, the challenge was the production of new fictions; for Žižek, the problem was escaping the already-operative fictions of Capital.” Fisher pushed in both directions throughout his works, but in The Weird and the Eerie especially.
You can order the new edition online here.
