Launch event for Mark Fisher's new book, Ghosts of My Life. This collection of writings on Zero Books by the author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.

Mark will talk in conversation with John Doran of The Quietus between DJ sets by Majed Aslam, Bob Stanley and Raime.

Copies of the book will be available on the night via Pages of Hackney.

Read an extract from Ghosts of My Life on The Quietus

Zero Books website

GHOSTS OF MY LIFE

‘After the brilliance of Capitalist Realism, Ghosts Of My Life confirms Mark Fisher’s role as our greatest and most trusted navigator of these times out of joint, through all their frissons and ruptures, among all their apparitions and spectres, past, present and future.’ – David Peace, author of the Red Riding Quartet and Red or Dead

‘A must read for modernists, and for anyone who misses the future. This is the first book to really make sense of the fog of ideas that have been tagged as “hauntology”. Ghosts Of My Life is enjoyable, progressive and exciting.’ – Bob Stanley, author of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop and member of Saint Etienne

‘No one writes as achingly well about our slow death by capitalism as Mark Fisher. Like the best of popular culture, he makes depression seductive–we find ourselves lost in a liberating hopelessness. Yet he turns this very liberation into a grimace of possibility, of a desire that exceeds the melancholia of left acquiescence to capitalist realism.’ - Jodi Dean, author of The Communist Horizon

‘Ghosts Of My Life confirms that Mark Fisher is our most penetrating explorer of the connections between pop culture, politics, and personal life under the affective regime of digital capitalism. The most admirable qualities of Fisher’s work are its lucidity, reflecting the urgency of his commitment to communicating ideas; his high expectations of popular art’s power to challenge, enlighten, and heal; and his adamant refusal to settle for less.’ – Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania and Rip It Up and Start Again

‘Mark Fisher reads the contemporary world like no other analyst of its miseries and madness and mores. He is driven by anger but, miraculously, he never forgets to celebrate, when that reaction is apposite. I find his work exhilarating, fascinating, deeply engaging and, not least, utterly vital; this world we have made for ourselves would be a lesser place without it.’ – Niall Griffiths, author of Grits and Sheepshagger

MARK FISHER

Mark Fisher is highly respected both as a music writer and a theorist. He writes regularly for The Wire, frieze, New Statesman, Sight & Sound and The Wire, where he was acting deputy editor for a year. He is a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University Of London, and maintains one of the most successful weblogs on cultural theory, k-punk.

k-punk.abstractdynamics.org