Our friends at Editorial Metaxis have just published the sixth edition of their fantastic webzine. The current issue explores Mark Fisher’s work in great depth, with essays from a number of students at the University of Barcelona, various interviews and other texts. It’s a very rich compendium!
Alongside interviews with the team at Caja Negra and Amador Fernández-Savater, there’s also an interview conducted with me. We talk about Fisher’s legacy, my new book Narcissus in Bloom, Foucault’s author-function and Mark’s Fisher-Function, photography and film, the dreamworlds of David Lynch, and a bunch of other stuff too.
The zine is mostly in Spanish, but the editors have also included the original English version of our interview as an appendix.
There’s a lot to dig into and I’m excited to work my way slowly through the essays included. Here’s a rough translation of the pre-text provided on their website:
Days have passed. We have received resonances and disjunctions orbiting at different distances from Mark Fisher’s center of gravity. We have spoken with Matt Colquhoun, with Amador Savater, with the founders of the publishing house Caja Negra that popularized his name in the Spanish language and there have been beautiful contributions that we have decided to include in this issue.
Both with Colquhoun and with Amador and the directors of Caja Negra, Diego Esteras and Ezequiel Fanego, we have been discussing the escapes, the possibilities that are in potential and are still half said, the joy of meeting and seeing the rebirth of new ways of understanding life and acting, of creating, questioning not only the theoretical-critical bulwark but its diffusion and the ways in which it is received, the great renunciation, the great depression, the great dissent, the meteorite of the climate crisis, of mental health, of machismo, the emergence of a new narcissism and tendencies of the reflective metamodern spirit. Stills that contain flashes that spring from the same pulse emitted by electronic music. Utopian environments that delineate the values we lost through pent-up rage. We thought without realizing that at some point we would have to carry it out, but, as we have been exploring, now the mutant force lurks everywhere, crouched, invisible… upper cut.
Anna, Toni, Alba, Julen… Young philosophy students, aware that they inhabit a planet in decline, do not lose their seasoning and, as their writings show, they already carry in their biographies the experiences with which they make their compasses and sketch cartographies of the spirit. The pharmaceutical industry, the dopamine-producing machines, the praise of acid communalism, the frontal clash against the devices disseminated by cities, institutions and hundreds of cultural objects… It is not the emergency that leads to writing but to running. Writing understands other kinds of emergencies: urgent, urgent, I have to shout, but I have no mouth. So, we make lips, tongues, teeth, windpipes, time to sit down and shout on the white paper the dark and bright of being alive without permission.
Fellow member of our committee, David, with his stylish pen as he has already demonstrated so many times, outlines, sketches, concepts and issues that, to this day, are still relevant since the publication of that Capitalist Realism that made Fisher so well known.
In this post-scriptum, we are on record that we are many, even if we do not speak to each other. That we are deeply in love, even if we do not confess it. That we are aware that we have been captured by specters who take us for cattle and that our quarrels are meaningless when we are only the remains of an exorcism or the flowers of a daffodil in bloom on the shores of a lake. A new world is approaching of which we only intuit what the wind whispers when we stop listening to ourselves. Its fatality seems to crack, although it remains in force. Here, we leave a record of the non-being that has brought us together. I wish we could tell you how beautiful it is every time it happens, but these affinities, when they appear, you will resent them to us and we will speak the same language.