Top 55 Mark Fisher Quotes

What better example than the World Cup is there of the fact that individual people are irrelevant while impersonal structures are invariant?

Jetsetting is now not the privilege of the elite so much as a veritiginous mundanity for a permanently dispossessed global workforce.

If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation.

The story of Basinski’s ‘Disintegration Loops’ – tapes that destroyed themselves in the transfer to digital – is a parable (again almost too perfect) for the switch from the fragility of analogue to the infinite replicability of digital.

It will come as no surprise that I would count Nietzsche the perspectivist – he who questioned not only the possibility but the value of Truth – as the enemy. There will be even fewer surprises that I would reject the Dionysian Nietzsche, the celebrant of transgressive desire.

Postmodernism is, of course, the dead end from which hauntology starts – but one of its role is to denaturalise what postmodernism has taken for granted, to conceive of postmodernism as a condition in the sense of a sickness.

Now that we are used to globalisation it’s hard to imagine a time when the countries behind the iron curtain were largely obscured from the western gaze. The Soviet bloc was a genuine mystery. Such was the dehumanisation of the Soviets that Sting could wonder in song if ‘the Russians love their children too.’

The World Cup is like the Overlook Hotel: the identities of individual meat puppets might change, but the structure continues endlessly.

What is remarkable about Joy Division is the way they are bereft of two of the mainstays of most other rock and pop: longing and supplication.

Children of Men’ reinforces what few would doubt, but which British cinema would seldom lead you to suspect: the British landscape bristles with cinematic potential.

Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Prestige’ is an enthralling study of doubles, doubling and duplicity. Its twinned themes are obsession and the Secret: the Secret as objet-a, that which inspires, but which can never satisfy, obsession.

We once turned to popular culture because it produced fantasy objects; now, we are asked to ‘identify with’ the fantasising subject itself.

Some IMDB viewers complain that ‘Beloved’ should have been reclassifed as Horror… well, so should American history.

The reality of nostalgia is nowhere better invoked than at the end of Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris.’ When the camera pans away from Kelvin embracing his father on the rain-soaked steps of his dacha, we realise that the scene is yet another of the simulations produced by the inscrutable planet.

I’m not sure that Liberation Theology has ever satisfactorily resolved the tensions between Marxism’s ‘social naturalism’ (the claim that all beliefs have their origins in social practice) and religion’s supernaturalism (the claims that its beliefs are underwritten by divine will).

You can be debased without relinquishing your identity, just as you can relinquish your identity without being debased.

Little Axe’s records are wracked with collective grief. Spectral harmonicas resemble howling wolves; echoes linger like wounds that will never heal; the voices of the living harmonise with the voices of the dead in songs thick with reproach, recrimination and the hunger for redemption.

In ‘A Scanner Darkly,’ as in ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,’ all intersubjective relations devolve into webs of suspicion and betrayal.

OK, so we all know that ‘Borat’ is humiliatingly, career-endingly unfunny (one trick too many for one-trick pony Sacha Double-Barelled) – but can anyone explain why the ‘character’ isn’t roundly condemned for being as unacceptably racist as the one-dimensional stereotypes from 70s sitcoms such as ‘Mind Your Language?’

The paradoxical War on Terror is based on a kind of willed stupidity; the willed stupidity of wishful thinking. Only the logic of dreamwork can suture ‘War’ with ‘Terror’ in this way, since terrorists were, by classical definition, those without ‘legitimate authority’ to wage war.

I make no special effort to conceal my surname online; the reason I do not use it is more because I dislike, even loathe it, than because I want to keep it a secret.

Picnic at Hanging Rock’ is the exemplary study of disapparition in cinema – I know of no other major film which deals with unexplained disappearance.

Abduction was what it felt like on first listening to Public Enemy. Like the post-punks, Public Enemy implicitly accepted the idea that a politics which came reassuringly dressed in established forms would be self-defeating.

There is no need to subject people in capitalism to additional suffering; the point is to get them to recognize that the suffering they are already undergoing is caused by capitalism.

The 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.

Star Wars’ was a sell-out from the start, and that is just about the only remarkable thing about this depressingly mediocre franchise.

What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation.

No ideology better understands the need for enemies than neoconservatism, and when the cold war dramatically and unexpectedly ended, the way was prepared for the ‘Arab threat’ to emerge. ‘True Lies,’ the 1994 James Cameron comedy thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, duly served up the Arab villain Salim Abu Aziz.

I have taught Philosophy, Religious Studies, English Literature, Cultural Studies, Writing and Publishing Studies, Critical Thinking.

What Public Enemy and Underground Resistance had in common was a rejection of the idea of music as entertainment.

Anti-capitalism is nothing new in Hollywood. From ‘Wall-E’ to ‘Avatar,’ corporations are routinely depicted as evil. The contradiction of corporate-funded films denouncing corporations is an irony capitalism cannot just absorb, but thrive on. Yet this anti-capitalism is only allowed within limits.

Crucially, Marxist atheism is only achieved once the theological critique of capitalism is completed. This is what separates Marxist atheism from the gliberal platitudes of the likes of Nick Cohen, who proclaim secularism while remaining attached to the theology of capital (liberal commonsense).

Columbo’s deliberately irritating questioning technique – ‘just one more thing’ – is designed to produce discomfort rather than to elicit information.

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.

Most psychiatrists assume that mental illnesses such as depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, which can be treated by drugs. But most psychotherapy doesn’t address the social causation of mental illness either.

In particularly acute cases of depression, it is recognized that no verbal or therapeutic intervention will reach the patient. The only effective remedy is to do things, even though the patient will, at that time, believe that any act is pointless and meaningless.

Capitalism does not require us to hold a particular set of cognitive beliefs; it only requires that we act as if certain beliefs (about money, commodities etc) are true. The rituals are the beliefs, beliefs which, at the level of subjective self-description, may well be disavowed.

I loathe my name because it is mine and also because it is not mine; it is at once too intimate and seems to have no connection with me. Perhaps because the name is quite common, it never seems to fit me, or fit me alone. Nevertheless, when I see the name, I always feel a peculiar sense of shame.

When pop can no longer muster a nihilation of the World, a nihilation of the Possible, then it will only be the ghosts that are worthy of our time.

Capitalism is a set of rituals.

Identity politics is not politics at all, since it precisely negates the political as such by re-construing political positions in ethnic terms, subsuming ‘ought’ under ‘is.’

The neoliberal policies implemented first by the Thatcher governments in the 1980s and continued by New Labour and the current coalition have resulted in a privatisation of stress.

Just because something is current doesn’t mean it is new.

Although it was published in 1977, “A Scanner Darkly’s” mood is already postpunk.

Play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.

Sometimes a disappearance can be more haunting than an apparition.

In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.

We’re invited to believe that the worst effects of Stalinism arose from its ‘dogmatic’ intransigence; but it is precisely because so much was left open to interpretation that its Terror was so pervasive.

On the Junior Boys’ ‘When No-one Cares’ beats are abandoned altogether, the track’s ‘endless night’ lit only by the dying-star flares and stalactite-by-flashlight pulse of reverbed electronics.

Nietzsche should not be taken seriously as a political theorist, at least not at the level of his positive prescriptions. But the Nietzsche who denounces the insipidity and mediocrity that result from democracy’s levelling impulses could not be more acute.