Post-Capitalist Desire

This collection of academic notes and transcripts, edited and introduced by Matt Colquhoun, reveals the acclaimed writer and blogger Mark Fisher in his element—the classroom—and describes a project that Fisher’s death left so bittersweetly unfinished. Beginning with the most fundamental of questions—“Do we really want what we say we want?”—Fisher explores the relationship between desire and capitalism and questions what new forms of desire we can still draw from the past, present, and future. From the rise and failure of the 1970s counterculture to the ongoing development of his left-wing accelerationist line of thought, this volume traces a tragically interrupted path toward thinking about the creation of a new kind of consciousness and the cultural and political implications of doing so. 

For Fisher, this process of awakening was always, fundamentally, psychedelic—but not in the way we might think... Mark Fisher (1968–2017) co-founded Zero Books and, later, Repeater Books. 

He was a member of the teaching staff at Goldsmiths, University of London’s Department of Visual Cultures. His blog, k-punk, defined the critical writing of a generation. In addition to Capitalist Desire, three more books by the author are published: Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life, and The Weird and the Uncanny, all by VS.

Matt Colquhoun is a writer and photographer from Hull, East Yorkshire. He is the author of Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher and writes and publishes on his blog, xenogothic.com.