Session Recap
Footnotes for our final two sessions are very belated indeed! But better late than never. These final two sessions, like the rest of the series, generated fantastic discussion, and even better reading lists! In particular, Fisher’s final lecture transcript ‘Libidinal Marxism’ had a lot to unpack, including his exploration of masochistic desire in Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, (“hang tight and spit on me” anyone?). Fisher asks his students, what do we do about
“the complication of desire and capitalism, […] a kind of capitalist desire that is immanent to the working class.”
– Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire
This lecture challenges us to acknowledge and explore the relationship between capitalism and our problematic desire in order to understand us what desire might look like in life beyond capitalism.
We decided to finish at the beginning, having our final session on Matt’s fantastic introduction to the book. This provided an excellent opportunity to reflect on all that we’d uncovered over the past 5 months, and the ideas and discussions which most spoke to us. This reading group has been an amazing opportunity to continue in our own small way the dialogue that Mark started for us, and begin to actually engage in the practices of group consciousness raising we have read and spoken so much about.
The series may have ended, but the conversation absolutely hasn’t!
We look forward to running many more events and series like this in future. But in the meantime, join us on Discord where the conversation continues.
Session footnotes are below, and the original reading list can be found here.
Books & Chapters
David Graeber, Debt: the First 5000 Years, 2011
McKenzie Ward, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, Verso, 2021
Rebecca Coleman, Glitterworlds: The Future Politics of a Ubiquitous Thing, Goldsmiths Press, 2020
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, University of Nebraska Press, 1955
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, 1991
Articles
Robert Costanza, ‘Four visions of the century ahead: Will it be Star Trek, Ecotopia, Big Government, or Mad Max?’, The Futurist, February 1999
What’s Next?
Our Postcapitalist Desire series may have finished, but we’re planning something special for the summer, so watch this space. In the meantime, our first ever guest editorial for Alluvium journal has now been published! You can find our ‘Futurity in Crisis’ special edition here. We hope to see you all at the launch event later this month – we’ll be advertising details soon!