Join Matt Colquhoun and James Butler as they examine the crucial legacy of Mark Fisher, to celebrate the publication of Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher, edited by Colquhoun. When we lost Mark Fisher in 2017, we lost one of our most exciting and vital critics of contemporary politics and culture. Providing lucid and excoriating critiques on subjects ranging from Dido to Drake; The Fall to James Blake; Breaking Bad to Benefits Street, he was moved by the emancipatory possibilities of popular culture. In publishing, he worked to spread radical ideas and provide a generation of new writers with a platform. Blogging as ‘k-punk’, he analysed everyday experiences of precarity, depression, and cultural malaise as profoundly political — and therefore changeable. Mark tirelessly sought alternatives to the world that we’ve been given, away from the destructive individualism of the present and towards a practical communitarian future. For the first time, Postcapitalist Desire reveals Mark Fisher in his element — the classroom — outlining a project that Fisher’s death left so bittersweetly unfinished. Beginning with that most fundamental of questions — “Do we really want what we say we want?” — Fisher explores the relationship between desire and capitalism, and wonders what new forms of desire we might still excavate from the past, present, and future. From the emergence and failure of the counterculture in the 1970s to the continued development of his left-accelerationist line of thinking, this volume charts a tragically interrupted course for thinking about the raising of a new kind of consciousness, and the cultural and political implications of doing so. For Fisher, this process of consciousness raising was always, fundamentally, psychedelic — just not in the way that we might think… Speakers Matt Colquhoun is a writer and photographer from Hull, East Yorkshire. He is the author of Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher and blogs at xenogothic.com. James Butler is the co-founded Novara Media and presents Novara FM on Resonance 104.4, as well as being a contributor to the LRB and others. Please read: If you purchase a “book plus entry ticket”, please email shop@housmans.com with a UK address. Postcapitalist Desire is published on 12 Jan 2021. An invitation to this online event will be emailed to you on the day of the event. We will use the email address used to purchase the ticket. Please check your spam folder and if you have not received the invitation by 5pm, email us and we will resend it. 

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