Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

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We bumped into each other occasionally, but increasingly rarely, and then twenty years have passed and there’s a funeral. Unfortunately, few of the other essays in this first section even approach the tightness of Fisher’s initial manifesto. In short: Take any music from the current decade and project it into the past, say, into the early 2000s. You can read this before Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures PDF EPUB full Download at the bottom.

Fisher’s mental health had deteriorated since May 2016, leading to a suspected overdose in December 2016, when he was admitted to Ipswich Hospital. In addition, there are individual essays (notably on John Le Carré and Jimmy Savile) which actually have something new and interesting to say about politics in each case. Confronted with capital’s intense semiotic pollution, its encrustation of the urban environment with idiotic sigils and imbecilic slogans no-one – neither the people who wrote them nor those at whom they are aimed – believes, you often wonder: what if all the effort that went into this flashy trash were devoted to a public good?

The book’s “primary concern” was rather “to effect a direct change in the affective disposition and cognitive outlook of the reader”.

We're told to strive for some sort of ideal life, which includes getting a good job, being kind to everyone, finding a partner, getting married, having a couple kids, living in a quiet neighborhood in a nice big house, etc. The irony, given the breadth of Fisher’s appeal, is that alienation is clearly a mainstream condition. The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so that his own frozen inner life – or inner death – overwhelms everything; at the same time, he experiences himself as evacuated, totally denuded, a shell: there is nothing except the inside, but the inside is empty. It’s a hollow attempt to assert meaning where there is none, of laying a hauntological template over the band's music simply because Fisher likes it.

In 2009, Fisher edited The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, a collection of critical essays on the career and death of Michael Jackson, and published Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

These lines, both content and rhythm, made me realise how much Ghosts of My Life reminded me of Joel Lane's writing. From the haunted screeds that appeared on his blog K-Punk, through the untimely meditations on precarity and the administration of affect in Capitalist Realism (2009), to his generalised presence today as melancholic – better, dysphoric – provocateur, Fisher’s has been a voice of relentless intelligence and (at his best) unabashed vulnerability in terms of fleeting personal revelation. The depressive cannot even lay claim to the comforts that a paranoiac can enjoy, since he cannot believe that the strings are being pulled by any one. I found myself listening to a lot of the less obvious music he discusses here (I am a fan of Tricky and Burial) and finding it much less compelling than his reviews and analysis made it sound.Reclaiming Modernity (2015), a ­clairvoyant pamphlet Fisher co-authored with his friend Jeremy Gilbert for the think tank Compass, asks: “Who knows what a culture in which the internet co- existed with strong social security would look like? And although the book is necessarily much less focused than its predecessor, it is well worth your time, subject to a couple of observations (rather than criticisms) about the kind of person who will get the most out of it. It’s very difficult, in our more deflated times, to re-create the counterculture’s confidence” that things might be otherwise. These encounters with avant-garde work, through mass – and in the case of the BBC, state-funded – media, convinced Fisher that a healthy popular culture can, and should, be innovative. A more accurate description would have been something like Writings on Electronic Music, Some Movies and Television Shows, with a short Intro on Hauntology.