Mark Fisher

Matt Colquhoun

A short zine collecting an introduction to the concept by Matt Colquhoun that appeared in 'krisis journal for contemporary philosophy Issue 2, 2018: Marx from the Margins' and the unfinished introduction to the unfinished book on Acid Communism that Mark Fisher was working on before his death in 2017. "In this way ‘Acid’ is desire, as corrosive and denaturalising multiplicity, flowing through the multiplicities of communism itself to create alinguistic feedback loops; an ideological accelerator through which the new and previously unknown might be found in the politics we mistakenly think we already know, reinstantiating a politics to come." —Matt Colquhoun

Acid Communism

Egress is the first book to consider the legacy and work of the writer, cultural critic and cult academic Mark Fisher. Narrated in orbit of his death as experienced by a community of friends and students in 2017, it analyses FisherÕs philosophical trajectory, from his days as a PhD student at the University of Warwick to the development of his unfinished book on Acid Communism. Taking the word ÒegressÓ as its starting pointÑa word used by Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie to describe an escape from present circumstances as experiences by the characters in countless examples of weird fictionÑEgress considers the politics of death and community in a way that is indebted to FisherÕs own forms of cultural criticism, ruminating on personal experience in the hope of making it productively impersonal.

On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher

Egress

Narcissism is the defining pathology of the twenty-first century, but what if it is not self-obsession that defines us but a need for self-transformation?

Narcissus in Bloom is a short history of the self-portrait, beginning with Renaissance painters like Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and Caravaggio, through to photographers and celebrities like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, Lee Friedlander and Hervé Guibert.

Analysing the ways that so many artists have regarded their own image, how might the age of the selfie be considered as a time of transformation rather than stasis? By returning to the original tale of Narcissus, and the flower from which he takes his name, this book offers an alternative reading of narcissism from within the midst of a moralising subgenre of books that argue our self-obsession will be the death of us. That may be so. But what will we become after we have taken the watery track, and rid ourselves of the cloistered self-image given to us by late capitalism?



Matt Colquhoun

Books

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