Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: We Are Not Here to Entertain You

 

 'All cultures have understood that being a blogger 

is to be a tortured monkey in Hell ...' 

 

 

I. 

 

Having taken a short break from my engagement with Mark Fisher, I'm diving back into k-punk - his collected and unpublished writings (2004 - 2016), edited by Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018) - and all page references given here (in round brackets) refer to this work (while additional notes are indicated by letters in square brackets). 

 

Let's pick things up in part six with an early post published on his famous blog to do with Spinoza and neuropunk ...

 

 

II.   

 

According to Fisher, being a Spinozist is "both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world" (622):

 

"Easy, because it is simply a matter of acting in such a way as to produce joyful encounters. Hard, because the defaults of the Human Operating System are [...] set against this." (622)

 

The problem lies in the oversized human brain and its complexity; the fact that the reptilian and mammalian layers are covered with a thin, folded third layer that is responsible for the so-called higher functions. 

 

It's this hominid layer responsible for language and consciousness on the one hand, that causes us also to desire that which is harmful to us - addictive and destructive forms of behaviour. Were it not for our unique brains, then we might not have art - but we might also have been spared the "unremitting misery, hatred and violence that have characterised human history" (623).  

 

What can be done about this? Well, short of blowing our brains out à la Kurt Cobain, we can attempt to become-inhuman via a cybernetics of organic disassembly. Fisher is keen to be clear on this point: 

 

"You don't disassemble the human organism by replacing its parts with metal or silicon components. [...] What matters is the overall organisation of the parts. Do the parts operate as hierarchically organised and functionally-specified 'organs' within a cybernegatively construed interiority or do they operate as deterritorialised potentials pulling from/towards the Outside?" (623)

 

The latter - as everybody now knows - is what Deleuze and Guattari (following Artaud) designate as the Body without Organs; a concept that Spinoza would have loved. 

 

Anyway, the point is this: becoming-inhuman via the building of a BwO is in our best interests if we want to be free and happy and escape our "enslavement to a vast immiserating machine" (622) that is the human brain. It's for this reason that Fisher is able to declare that "k-punk is also neuropunk: an intensive rewiring of humanity's neural circuits" (624).  

 

And you thought it was just a blog ... [a]

 

 

III. 

 

Like Fisher, I'm not keen on hostile and abusive narcissists who choose to "air their resentments, ill-thought bile, and tedious ego-defence opinionism" (628) in the comments sections of blogs. Although, unlike Fisher, I don't operate any kind of policy regarding who can say what on TTA, nor do I delete negative remarks. 

 

So, even when I am faced with "clinically deranged second-stringer stalker-obsessive autists with delusions of relevance" (630), I try to smile, stay calm, and move on. 

 

IV.  

 

Like Fisher - and this is probably a punk thing [b] - I despise hippies; their hedonic infantilism and its "pathetic legacy in New Age zen bullshit" (23). 

 

As fundamentally "a middle-class male phenomenon" (234), there was never really anything countercultural about the counterculture, nor sensual about its hazy-lazy aesthetic: 

 

"The hippies' sloppy, ill-fitting clothes, unkempt appearance and fuzzed-out psychedelic fascist drug talk displayed a disdain for sensuality characteristic of the Western master class." (235)

 

And like Fisher, I also despise the hippies' drug of choice: dope. 

 

In a k-punk post dated 03 December 2004, he writes:

 

"What is supposed to be good about dope? The problem with it is not just the resultant psychosis but the ACTUAL STATE it puts people into in the first place - chronically demotivated, lethargic, filled with [...] idiot porcine self-satisfaction ..." (632)

 

Dope, Fisher continues, reduces people to the status of unthinking zombified consumer dreamed of by late capitalism. 

 

Only those who are dissatisfied want to read and think; not those enslaved to the pleasure principle. It's politically expedient, therefore, to have effectively decriminalised the consumption of cannabis (even if, in the UK, laws technically remain in place controlling the possession, sale, and production).   

 

 

V.

 

Does all this - his refusal to enter into dialogue, his hatred of hippies, his opposition to dope-smoking - make Fisher an intolerant dogmatist? 

 

Probably. 

 

Indeed, he admits as much in a k-punk post dated 17 February 2005, dismissing those who defend or advocate for tolerance, debate, respect for otherness, etc., as bourgeois liberals.

 

Now, I have to admit, I was similarly fanatic when younger. But I don't recall ever actually declaring myself to be an out-and-out dogmatist committed to the view that there are Truths (with a capital T) and that there is such a thing as the Good (with a capital G). 

 

And by the time I was Fisher's age when he was writing this - thirty-six - I was a long way removed (philosophically and politically) from my position during my punk, pagan and eco-fascist days and no longer wished to kill the bothersome fly. 

 

Fisher would doubtless say I had become a cynical PoMo-puppet, lost in sceptico-relativism and thus unable to act with conviction or affirm the future with hope and uncurbed enthusiasm. But I'd rather be a grey vampire [c] than end up arguing in all sincerity that dogmatism is religion in the best sense - in that it allows for an unapologetic assertion of universal values - thereby inviting people to spit on me. 

 

 

VI.

 

Moving on ... I was amused to read this: "I'm of course delighted to have been shopped to the commissars of commonsense who compile Private Eye's 'Pseuds Corner'" (643).  

 

Because, like Fisher, I too was once assigned a place in the above: one of Ian Hislop's lackeys deciding to mock my 2007 lecture series titled Zoophilia at Treadwell's Bookshop and finding the paper on Eve's encounter with the serpent discussed in relation to transhuman futures and sexual congress with snakes particularly worthy of ridicule [d].

 

Fisher is spot-on, of course, to say that the function of 'Pseud's Corner' is "to punish writing that in some way overreaches itself, that gets ideas above its station or gets carried away" and that "the effect on any writer who internalises the critique is to be intimidated into colourless mediocrity" (643). 

 

Luckily, I never internalise anything, so that wasn't an issue for me - and I do hope Mark didn't take being called self-serious and pretentious too much to heart. 

 

 

VII.   

     

I've never been a big fan of Morrissey: I like some of his songs, but have never bought any of his records. But Fisher does a good job of making Morrissey sympathetic to me, if what he writes here is true: 

 

"Morrissey represented the desire for a proletarian bohemia at the moment when - after the Sixties, after glam, after punk and post-punk - that possibility was being closed down." (653)

 

Fisher calls this Wildean defiance and writes of how the aspiration to enter into bohemia "was always the wrong kind of ambition from the perspective of a certain working-class way of thinking" (654). 

 

Like Mark, I also know what it's like to have family members who regard writing as a hobby and put pressure on me to get a real job.

 

 

VIII.     

 

'Exiting the Vampire Castle' (2013) remains one of my favourite pieces by Fisher - perhaps because it was one of the first things by him that I read. But it's also a piece I have written about in an earlier post, so  readers who are interested can click here.

 

That, then, just leaves the unfinished introduction to Fisher's proposed new book - Acid Communism - to discuss; a text from 2016 that comprises part seven of k-punk ...

 

A friend of mine - who, as a matter of fact, likes Fisher's work more than I do - nevertheless admits that Capitalist Realism (2009) might be regarded (somewhat ungenerously) as Fredric Jameson for beginners. 

 

And one can't help wondering if Acid Communism wouldn't have been a far more readable, updated sequel to Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) ...

 

Fisher's unfinished introduction certainly lends itself to this view, as it opens with a long quote from Marcuse and Fisher regrets the "declining influence of his work in recent years" (674) - work which "vividly evokes, as an immediate prospect, a world totally transformed" (675). 

 

Fisher continues:

 

"It was no doubt this quality of his work that meant Marcuse was taken up so enthusiastically by elements of the Sixties counterculture. He had anticipated the counterculture's challenge to a world dominated by meaningless labour. The most politically significant figures in literature, he argued in One-Dimensional Man, were 'those who don't earn a living, at least not in the ordinary and normal way'. Such characters, and the forms of life with which they were associated, would come to the fore in the counterculture." (675) 

 

Critics will dismiss this as an outmoded Romanticism. But it's worth pointing out, as Fisher does point out, that "as much as Marcuse's work was in tune with the counterculture, his analysis also forecast its ultimate failure and incorporation" (675). 

 

He, Marcuse, wasn't naive or a starry-eyed dreamer - and neither is Fisher. Both see quite clearly the way in which even the most radical art can be quickly and effectively neutralised:

 

"A major theme of One-Dimensional Man was the neutralisation of the aesthetic challenge. Marcuse worried about the popularisation of the avant-garde, not out of elitist anxieties that the democratisation of culture would corrupt the purity of art, but because the absorption of art into the administered spaces of capitalist commerce would gloss over its incompatibility with capitalist culture. He had already seen capitalist culture convert the gangster, the beatnik and the vamp from 'images of another way of life' into 'freaks or types of the same life'." (675)

 

So, let's return to Marcuse - and let's return to the Sixties! Of the two, it's perhaps the later which is the most surprising move after all that Fisher once wrote about hippies and the counterculture (see section IV above). But, says Fisher, Marcuse allows us to see why the Sixties continue to exert a crucial influence on the present:

 

"In recent years, the Sixties have come to seem at once like a deep past so exotic and distant that we cannot imagine living in it, and a moment more vivid than now - a time when people really lived, when things really happened. Yet the decade haunts not because of some unrecoverable and unrepeatable confluence of factors, but because the potentials it materialised and began to democratise - the prospect of a life freed from drudgery - has to be continually suppressed." (675)    

 

It's not so much that Fisher is now encouraging us to trust the hippies after all, rather, he's attempting to re-narrate the past [e] and salvage the utopianism of the 1960s counterculture and divorce psychedelic consciousness from both New Age escapism and capitalist commodification. 

 

As we saw earlier (section II), Fisher wants to rewire the collective consciousness in such a manner that misery and depression no longer seem part and parcel of the human condition - that we have the right to demand joy (be that Spinozan or bohemian in nature). 

 

Acid communism was Fisher's term for the ultimate neuropunk experiment - "a provocation and a promise" (677) to blow minds and raise consciousness - although whether it would also result in red plenty, universal liberation and happiness all round is something I remain unconvinced of. 

 

And I'm really not about to start listening to The Beatles, FFS, or take up residence in some psychedelic shack alongside The Temptations [f].

  

 

Notes

 

[a] Fisher had high hopes for blogging (at its best) when he started k-punk: "What has begun to emerge on the most destratifying elements of the blogosphere is a depersonalising, desubjectifying network producing more joyful encounters in a positive feedback process ..." (624)

      I rather suspect, however, that were Fisher still with us he would say of me what he says of fellow blogger Marcello Carlin in this k-punk post of 13 August 2004: "a morbidly compelling example of how not to be a good Spinozist" (624); someone who engages with "their own frozen images" (624) rather than directly and sensitively with the world and displays a "pathetically resentful hunger for attention" (624). I don't feel I show enough loyalty to the Kollektive to appeal to someone like Fisher.    

      Although you never know, he may have found something to his liking on TTA, just as Fisher's critical view of Carlin radically changed over the following decade, transforming their relationship from public conflict into one of deep, mutual respect. 

 

[b] Johnny Rotten hated hippies for their complacency as he saw it. And Malcolm McLaren famously warns Helen in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) to never trust a hippie. 

 

[c] For Fisher, a grey vampire is an individual who attaches himself to passionate, creative people, only to slowly drain their energy by constantly equivocating and sneering. If outwardly they appear charming, humorous, and intelligent, they are all the time seeking to undermine, demoralise and curb enthusiasm. Forever promising they are about to produce a major piece of work themselves, their perpetual procrastination ensures they fail to ever finish anything of value or substance.

      See his k-punk post 'Break Through in Grey Lair' (16 August 2009), pp. 645-648, where he describes grey vampirism as a symptom of mental illness as well as characteristic of postmodern scepticism. He also posits a family resemblance between grey vampires and trolls, both of whom find a home in the Academy.

      Here, of course, I am adopting the term grey vampire ironically and self-deprecatingly. And whereas Fisher viewed the grey vampire as a deeply negative, energy-sapping symbol of late capitalism, my text uses it to defend a model of scepticism contra dogmatism.  

 

[d] Unfortunately, I cannot recall the number or date of the issue of Private Eye in which I featured in Pseud's Corner. However, Gary Lachman wrote of it in an article for the Independent (16 September 2007) and this can be read online here.

 

[e] According to Fisher: "The past has to be continually re-narrated, and the political point of reactionary narratives is to suppress the potentials which still await, ready to be re-awakened, in older moments." (676) 

      I suppose the point is there's much more to the Sixties than the simulated version we are presented with by the media; i.e., "the reduction of the decade to 'iconic' images, to 'classic' music and to nostalgic reminiscences" (676) which neutralise the real promise of the era. 

 

[f] Fisher refers us to The Beatles track 'Tomorrow Never Knows' on Revolver (1966) and to 'Psychedelic Shack' by The Temptations (from the album of the same name, 1970) and argues that in these songs and the counterculture that inspired them you can hear the promise of acid communism: a new humanity, a new way of thinking, a new way of loving; "music such as this was an active dreaming which arose out of real social and cultural compositions, and which fed back into potent new collectivities [...] which rejected both drudgery and traditional resentments" (689). 

      Again, I'm not convinced, but anyone who wants to tune in and drop out can click on the links supplied.    

 

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: A Little Bit More Politics (Sections VII - XIII)

Марк Фишер: Кислотный коммунист

(SA/2026)

 

Note: All page references in this post are to Mark Fisher's k-punk: 

The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), 

ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018). 

 

 

VII. 

 

Fisher may have hated D. H. Lawrence, but perhaps he might have appreciated Lawrence's idea of a democracy of touch [a], as one of his criticisms of the smartphone and other forms of touchscreen technology is that they involve touch devoid of any sensuality: 

 

"When the fingers encounter the glassy surface of the iPhone, everything they touch on the screen feels the same. The fingers are effectively acting as extensions of the eye and the brain - an eye and brain that have now been radically re-habituated by cyberspace." (487) 

 

Fisher thinks it astonishing that this line of thought was anticipated by Baudrillard in the 1980s - but even more remarkable is the fact that Lawrence foresaw all this in the 1920s. 

 

And like Tanizaki, Lawrence also wrote in praise of shadows, which, rather surprisingly, Fisher calls for the cultivation of in addition to the carving out of spaces "beyond the hyper-bright instant" (487). I so much prefer this poetic-philosophical Mark Fisher to the one who bangs on about politics and the financial crisis of 2008. 

 

 

VIII. 

 

The phrase that best sums up Fisher's utopian phase - his acid communism - is red plenty (a phrase he borrows from Francis Spufford's 2010 book of that title). It refers to the collective capacity of the People to "produce, care and enjoy" (510) and is the thing which, he says, capitalism is set up to block: 

 

"The attack on capital has to be fundamentally based on the simple insight that, far from being about 'wealth creation', capital necessarily and always blocks our access to this common wealth." (510) 

 

In a post-capitalist future, technological advancements and the communist re-ordering of society will provide abundance for all: "Everything for everyone" (510), including bread and roses. Gone forever will be the days of artificial scarcity. 

 

Further, everyone will feel a sense of red belonging - a sense of belonging that has nothing to do with faith, flag, or family and cannot be "reduced to the chauvinistic pleasures that come from being an insider in any group whatsoever" (510-511). 

 

It is, rather, a "special sense of involvement that promised to transfigure all aspects of everyday life in a way that, previously, only religion had promised to, so that even the dreariest task could be imbued with high significance" (511). 

 

The great promise of red plenty and red belonging is that it doesn't matter "where you come from or who you are" (511), you will be cared for unconditionally. 

 

It's clear how this line of thinking might feed into the open borders movement. What's not quite so clear is how such thinking relates to Fisher's own mental health; frankly, I can't see how anyone can promote such ideas without being in some sort of delirium (similar to the mystical state experienced by those who suddenly find God) [b]. 

 

I know some of his more ardent supporters believe that Fisher's speculative nostalgia and hallucinogenic politics is the best way to confront capitalist realism, but for those looking for a rather more practical strategy for transitioning from neoliberalism to a democracy to come, Fisher's work is essentially worthless. It also seems somewhat at odds with his own more pessimistic views and criticism of the moralising left. 

 

In sum: whilst I'm all for the creation of new narratives and conceptual frameworks - and maybe even a little bit of libidinal engineering - Fisher's acid communism fails to convince and red plenty leaves me hungry for something more. 

 

 

IX. 

 

And back to the topic of consciousness-raising ... A practice (or range of practices) that Fisher believes to be of crucial importance to molecular revolution: 

 

"Consciousness-raising opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorising about, a collective experience. It can give us the resources to behave, think and act differently [...]" (514) 

 

For Fisher: 

 

"The roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings, especially their feelings of misery and desperation, and together attributing the sources of these feelings to impersonal structures [...] mediated by particular figures to which we must attach populist loathing" (514). 

 

These figures would include, for example, landlords and entrepreneurs, whom Fisher brands as parasites. We might, I would suggest, see this as a succinct definition of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment and which is central to slave morality. 

 

Fisher claims that the aim of consciousness-raising is to produce more compassion "for others and for ourselves" (514), but I worry that his proposed method of consciousness-raising will only generate class hate and make people feel pretty rotten about themselves too; has knowing that others feel as desperate as you do ever really helped? [c] 

 

 

X.

 

Fisher is grateful to Francis Spufford for reminding us all that "when communism was defeated, it wasn't just a particular ideology that disappeared" (518). 

 

No, the demise of communism - and he's thinking here of the USSR - was also "the disappearance of modernism's Promethean dream of a total transformation of human society" (518). 

 

Now you might be forgiven for thinking that's a good thing. For this dream became a dystopian nightmare, did it not? Surely Fisher knows the history of the Soviet Union - and, indeed, he might also be expected to know what happened to Prometheus (for those who don't recall their Ancient Greek mythology, it ended even worse for him than for Trotsky).    

 

Is Fisher really falling back into what Nick Land would call a sentimental indulgence - i.e., the hope that a political revolution will lead to "new productive, perceptual, cognitive and libidinal possibilities" (518). 

 

I don't want to be a postmodern killjoy who radically lowers expectations and crushes dreams, etc. But, really, c'mon! Knowing, Mark, that there's no way back to old school communism [d], why pin your hopes on renewing (and resuming) class solidarity and the building of radical machineries of desire? 

 

 

XI. 

 

I mentioned above how, for Fisher, "the roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings" (514). 

 

And yet, in another text from 2015, titled 'Anti-Therapy', Fisher acknowledges that the idea that "talking about our feelings could be a political act seems counterintuitive" (521) and that this new emotionalism seems closely linked to capitalist realism - born of Tony Blair's "manipulation of the extraordinary grief jamboree that ensued in the immediate wake of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales" (521). 

 

Fisher rightly says that the new emo-politics enforced by New Labour "went far beyond mere mood-setting" (522) - now we all had to possess the right feelings and share them in the approved manner. Blair "led the way in normalising the emotional self-exploitation that was necessary for the final phase of neoliberalism in Britain" (522) - a phase that Fisher amusingly calls spincerity (the public performance of an emotion you may or may not genuinely feel). 

 

It's enough to make one wish for the return of traditional British restraint and resolve; of stiff upper-lips and stoical detachment. However, Fisher sees this as reactionary and posits in contrast a third way (if I can use such a phrase); one based on his reading of Spinoza. 

 

For Spinoza's philosophy "makes the management of emotions central to its project" (524) and aims not to repress feelings, but engineer joy via the use of reason. This, for Fisher, makes Spinoza "a thinker whose work is an indispensable resource for any progressive project" (524) - a view that is not uncommon amongst neo-Marxist thinkers (particularly those influenced by Deleuze and Badiou) [e].  

 

Get Spinoza on board, says Fisher, and talking about our feelings can become a radical political act; "part of a practice of consciousness-raising that makes visible the impersonal and intersubjective structures that ideology normally obscures from us" (530).  

 

  

XII.  

 

This seems at first a rather disingenuous thing to write: 

 

"It's somewhat ironic that theories of the 'Event' have come to the fore [...] at just the moment in history when it has become clear that events in and of themselves don't change anything." (531)

 

For Fisher surely knows that the Event (as conceptualised by philosophers) is extremely rare and has little to do with the events covered by the news media, such as Live Aid, for example, or the G20 protests. The Event - at least as I understand it (inspired by Lawrence) - is a rent in the Great Umbrella; something that allows a glimpse of chaos and the discovery of a new world via the destruction of fixed forms [f].  

 

But perhaps Fisher was thinking of something said by Zarathustra to the effect that what matters more than noisy, violent events are those changes that take place in us in our stillest hours: "'The world revolves, not around the inventors of new noises, but around the inventors of new values: it revolves inaudibly.'" [g] 

 

Heidegger picked up on this idea after the War, when he attempted to purge his notion of Transzendenz - Dasein's ability to start over and transform the world - not only from its conventional ties to metaphysics but to the idea of action. What was required, Heidegger argued, was not some great event, but a form of silent waiting. 

 

What seems most to worry Fisher is that events often result in euphoric outbursts of feeling "followed by depressive collapse" (531) - but the same could be said of love, no? 

 

Still, if events are the be-all and end-all - if change doesn't happen through them alone - "there are nevertheless moments which function as thresholds, opening up a new terrain of struggle, and allowing different collective emotions to propagate" (532). 

 

Which is basically saying things can still happen out of the blue ...   

 

 

XIII.  

 

Finally, we come to the two short texts, both from 2016, with which part four of k-punk closes; firstly, 'Cybergothic vs Steampunk' and, secondly, 'Mannequin Challenge' ...

 

In the former, Fisher argues that the global terrorist network ISIS "holds up a mirror to twenty-first century capitalist nihilism" (544). A form of nihilism that is essentially a type of existential poverty. We might not like to admit it, but ISIS offer a solution to this (albeit a horrifically false solution). For like criminal gangs and religious cults, ISIS offer those who join fellowship and meaning.    

 

Perhaps more interestingly, Fisher describes ISIS in relation to his concept of the cybergothic:

 

"There are no 'pure' archaisms, nothing ever repeats without difference, and ISIS is properly understood as a cybergothic phenomenon which combines the ancient with the contemporary (beheadings on the web)." (546)

 

And whilst he is obviously not a supporter of ISIS, Fisher - a bit like Foucault, who greeted the Iranian Revolution in 1979 with warm enthusiasm [h] - is excited by "the rising tide of experimental political forms in so many areas of the world at the moment" (546). 

 

And that's because, for him, this shows that "people are rediscovering group consciousness and the potency of the collective" (546).     

 

I can't help wondering whether, if he were alive today, Fisher (like Foucault in his late work) would find it necessary to rethink questions central to the Enlightenment and to liberalism. To concede, for example, that whilst the individual is a political fiction, it's nevertheless a useful one which needs vigorously defending; as does secular society when threatened by militant religious fascism. 

 

In the latter piece, Fisher comments on Donald Trump and his successful campaign in 2016 to become President of the United States. 

 

In contrast to Clinton and her team of "political robots playing out an exhausted programme" (547), Trump's campaign "was possessed of a sense of effervescing excitement, of anarchic unpredictability, the feeling of belonging to a building-movement" (547). 

 

Fisher understands how Trump caught the mood of popular dissatisfaction with capitalist realism and performed with a certain libidinal freedom that was attractive not only to his supporters, but to many who wouldn't vote for him in a million years and were appalled by his rhetoric and immoderation. His campaign may have been ugly, but at least it wasn't boring. 

 

In brief, like many other commentators of a certain generation, Fisher recognised that Trump was the punk candidate (what this tells us about the latter is an interesting question we might discuss one day).   

 

Notes

 

[a] I have written several posts referencing this Lawrentian idea; see, for example, the post dated 14 May 2014 - 'Towards a Democracy of Touch' - click here. 

      Note that the word 'hated' is used deliberately here; Matt Colquhoun confirmed to me in a recent email (7 May 2026) Fisher's visceral hostility toward Lawrence.

 

[b] Normally, I would not comment on someone's mental health. However, since Fisher and his followers make such a point of politicising depression - arguing that it is a social phenomenon heavily influenced by capitalism rather than a purely chemical or biological issue - I feel justified in doing so.

      Note, however, that my use of the term delirium is not simply intended in the narrow clinical sense, but more in the philo-political sense deployed by Deleuze and Guattari, for whom delirium is a way the unconscious invests in the social field, sometimes opening up revolutionary lines of flight. I suggest that Fisher's vision of acid communism operates as this precise kind of political delirium; an elaborate, idealised alternative reality constructed to escape the immense psychological claustrophobia of capitalist realism. Such a vision of utopia functions as a temporary, internal flight mechanism from profound depression. Suddenly, the world feels meaningful and loving once more. 

      However, as a political strategy, this hallucinogenic clarity borders on a mystical state rather than practical materialist organising. And, unfortunately, such states seldom last; when the speculative fantasy dissolves, the individual comes back down to earth with a bump, resulting in renewed depression. Fisher, as most readers will know, tragically committed suicide less than two years after writing the text discussed here.

 

[c] Historically, of course, it has. In the second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups of the late 1960s and 1970s, for example, sharing personal experiences of isolation, shame, and subjugation was precisely what allowed women to see that their private misery was structural and political. This collective realisation was a vital catalyst for solidarity and agency. 

      However, my contention with Fisher is that his specific formula for consciousness-raising risks short-circuiting this therapeutic transformation. Rather than moving from shared misery to structural agency, Fisher's explicit demand for populist loathing targeted at parasites paves a direct line toward Nietzschean ressentiment. It risks trapping the participants in a permanent state of reactive anger and class hate, which ultimately toxicifies the self and breeds a new form of psychological misery. 

      Of course, Fisher himself is aware of this danger, which is why he later refers readers to Wendy Brown's essay 'Wounded Attachments' (1993) - an essay in which she diagnoses the psycho-libidinal origins of an identity politics and what those on the right call wokism. 

      Fisher writes: "Drawing on Nietzsche's account of resentment [...] Brown wrote of a political subjectivity which 'becomes deeply invested in its own impotence, even while it seeks to assuge the pain of its powerlessness through its vengeful moralizing, through its wide distribution of suffering, through its reproach of power as such'" (526-527). And Fisher concludes that today "the mixture of moralizing aggression and investment in impotence has proliferated in a political atmosphere now substantially shaped by the online environment" (527).

      Brown's essay can be found in Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (August 1993), pp. 390-410. It can be accessed via JSTOR by clicking here.  

 

[d] Fisher says as much: "I don't believe that the old signifier 'communism' can be revived [...] It is now irretrievably tainted by terrible associations, forever tied to the nightmares of the twentieth century" (520). Funnily enough, however, a few months later he names his new politics of desire emerging from the future ... acid communism.  

 

[e] As a Lawrentian, I have my reservations about Spinoza and his rationalism. Nevertheless, his work is useful in exposing the myth of the autonomous individual at the heart of the liberal tradition which drags with it notions of free will and responsibility.   

 

[f] See the post titled 'on Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella' (10 June 2013): click here.  

 

[g] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 153-154.  

 

[h] Writing in an Italian daily newspaper (Corriere della Sera), Foucault praised the Iranian Revolution as an authentic anti-imperialist movement and a spiritual revolt against Western-imposed modernity, rather than just a religious coup. See my post dated 14 August 2014, in which I discuss this: click here. 

 

 

This post is a continuation of my previous post on Fisher's political writings in the book k-punk (2018): click here. 

 

And for earlier thoughts on Fisher's political writings in the above work, please click here.

 

  

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: Book Meme

 

Mark Fisher and three of his intellectual heroes: 

Messrs. Kafka, Spinoza, and Ballard 

 

 

I. 

 

It hardly seems appropriate to comment on Fisher's reading habits as, for the most part, I have never read the authors that seem to mean the most to him; Kafka, Spinoza, Margaret Atwood, et al.  

 

Well, I've read some Kafka and I value Deleuze and Guattari's study of Kafka in terms of a minor literature, but I've never made of him the "intimate and constant companion" [a] that Fisher makes of him. 

 

I don't know why that is - what does make us love certain writers and the books they produce over others? 

 

Barthes famously answers this question in terms of desire. We privilege those writers whose texts have a sensual appeal; their language and writing style causes a certain frisson resulting in an intense form of pleasure that he terms jouissance. To put it somewhat crudely: it ain't what they say, it's the way that they say it (that's what gets results). 

 

In other words, our preference for certain writers and certain books is subjective and sometimes even authors that we like and like a lot, fail to produce that je ne sais quoi that is required for us to really love them, as Fisher loves Kafka. 

 

And sometimes, even brilliant authors whom everyone insists we should love - such as Joyce, Dostoevsky, Burroughs and Beckett - either leave us cold or rub us up the wrong way. 

 

 

II.           

 

Fisher says that reading a really great work of philosophy - he names Spinoza's Ethics - "is like running a Videodrome cassette: you think you are playing it, but it ends up playing you, effecting a gradual mutation of the way you think and perceive" (25).

 

And that's true, of course. Which is why philosophy is a dangerously perverse practice and why the Athenians were not wrong to charge Socrates with corrupting the youth.

 

Interestingly, Spinoza gave the Nazis a particular headache; as a Jewish philosopher, his works were viewed as un-German and so many of his books were confiscated and banned - but they just couldn't bring themselves to burn them, acknowledging the praise given to Spinoza by great figures in German cultural life including Goethe and Nietzsche. 

 

Having ordered the seizure of a valuable collection of his books from the Spinoza Museum in Amsterdam in 1942, Alfred Rosenberg determined to solve the Spinoza problem by reconciling the philosopher's genius with Nazi ideology - unaware of what Fisher calls the Videodrome effect.      

 

 

III. 

 

J. G. Ballard is an author that Fisher and I share knowledge of and love for, although I value his better-known novel Crash (1973) over his earlier (more experimental) text The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). 

 

That's because I require a little more in the way of plot and character development than Fisher, betraying the fact that I have a background in English literature rather than theory and doubtless making me a bourgeois romantic in the eyes of some.    

 

Still, despite my more conventional character, I agree with Fisher that Ballard helped rescue us from "decent humanist certainties and Sunday supplement sleepiness" (26) and, obviously, that's one of the reasons to admire him.   

 

 

IV.

 

I still find it a little surprising that punk scholar Russ Bestley doesn't much care for Greil Marcus's secret history of the twentieth century, Lipstick Traces (1989); describing the study as "deeply flawed - and unfathomably influential" [b] and a largely failed attempt to "make connections between the Sex Pistols, Dada, Surrealism and the philosophies of much earlier political agitators" [c]. 

 

That might be true, but it's often the case that we learn more from such failed attempts to form rhizomatic connections than we do from successful, self-contained books based on arborescent models that are proud of their own organic interiority, etc.  

 

And so, I agree with Fisher that the work's "vast web of connections opened up an escape route" (26) and brilliantly made the point that pop music "can only have any significance when it [...] reverberates with a politics that has nothing to do with capitalist parliamentarianism and a philosophy that has nothing to do with the academy" (26). 

 

It's not perfect by any means, but it largely succeeds in registering the impact and importance of punk - particularly the Sex Pistols - which is why, I suppose, Malcolm McLaren was always a big fan of the book.   

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Mark Fisher, 'book meme' (20/06/2005), in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 24. All future page references to this work will be placed directly in the post. 

 

[b] Russ Bestley, Turning Revolt Into Style, (Manchester University Press, 2025), p. 13. I discuss Bestley's book at length in several posts previously published on TTA: click here.

 

[c] Ibid., p. 57. 

 

 

This is one of several planned posts in the 'Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk' series: click here.  

 

 

Notes on Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (2009) 3: Chapters 7-9

Warwick alumni: Messrs. Alexander and Fisher

 

This is a continuation of a post: part 1 can be accessed by clicking here 

and part 2 by clicking here. 

 

 

I.

 

In a sense, this isn't so much a book review as an attempt to occupy the textual space that Fisher has succinctly mapped out in his book Capitalist Realism and meet him there in and on his own terms. 

 

But it is also a staged confrontation; perhaps even an attempt to exorcise his ghost (it's difficult not to feel a little haunted by Fisher at times). But it's a confrontation that is hopefully carried out in an amiable manner and a generous spirit. One that whilst opening up a pathos of distance between us as cultural commentators, also indicates that we clearly share certain interests, ideas, and points of reference. 

 

Anyway, let us return to the book, Capitalist Realism (2009) [a] - picking up where we left off in part two, at the beginning of chapter 7 ...

 

 

II.   

 

Back in the old days, being realistic was a relatively straightforward affair; because the real was fixed and everyone agreed what it was. 

 

But now, being realistic in the age of capitalist realism, "entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment" (54). Now nobody knows quite what's real and what's not, or where they are (readers will recall Fisher spoke earlier of perpetual instability). 

 

That's fine for a small number of people (including Nietzscheans), but can cause issues for the majority who like to know what's what and rely upon what is called common sense. The only way to stay sane is to comply with the madness of the world: 

 

"This strategy - of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question - has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play in late capitalism [...]" (56)

   

It probably helps if one can actively forget most things too; again, for those of a Nietzschean disposition, that fortunately comes easily. 

 

But for those people more like elephants than goldfish - particularly those individuals burdened with hyperthymesia [b] - it isn't easy to forget and, amongst such people it wouldn't be surprising "if profound social and economic instability resulted in a craving for familiar cultural forms" (59) to which they could return to again and again. 

 

This in part explains why postmodernity is retromaniacal in character; "excessively nostalgic, given over to retrospection, incapable of generating any authentic novelty" (59). 

 

 

III. 

 

According to Fisher, although "excoriated by both neoliberalism and neoconservativism, the concept of the Nanny State continues to haunt capitalist realism" (62) - playing as it does an essential libidinal function; "there to be blamed precisely for its failure to act as a centralizing power" (62) when things go wrong. 

 

Why look for systemic causes for the 2008 financial crisis, for example, when you can blame the government? 

 

The fact is, global capitalism's radical lack of a centre is simply unthinkable for most people; they simply can't help believing that there has to be someone somewhere pulling the strings and in control (this returns us once more to the need for God's shadow to be shown in caves long after God himself has departed the scene).   

 

It's at this point Fisher refers us to the call centre that terrifying non-space and "world without memory, where cause and effect come together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens" (63).  

 

Fisher hates the call centre which, in his view, distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism in a distinctly Kafkaesque [c] manner: 

 

"The boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since - as is very quickly clear to the caller - there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could." (64)   

 

He continues:

 

"Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centreless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself." (64)

 

Capital - and capitalism - that's the issue; that's the problem - not individuals nor even the corporations. For not even the corporations "are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by / expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-a-subject: Capital" (70). 

 

All of which puts one in mind of the Lawrence verse 'Kill Money', which opens with the following lines: 

 

 

Kill money, put money out of existence. 

It is a perverted instinct, a hidden thought 

which rots the brain, the blood, the bones, the stones, the soul. [d]  

 

 

IV. 

 

The final chapter of Capitalist Realism opens with a discussion of the Channel 4 reality show Supernanny, starring Jo Frost. It's a show about parents struggling with their children's behaviour; or, as Fisher argues, a relentless (if implicit) attack on "postmodernity's permissive hedonism"(71) and the failure of the paternal superego (or father function) in late capitalism. 

 

Having never watched the show, I'm going to have to take his word on that. 

 

The question is: what might a paternalism without a father look like (assuming a return of the paternal superego is neither possible nor desirable in an age in which Mum knows best) and "the 'paternal' concept of duty has been subsumed into the 'maternal' imperative to enjoy" (71)?  

 

"A question as massive as this cannot of course be answered in a short book such as this [...] In brief, though, I believe that it is Spinoza who offers the best resources for thinking through what a 'paternalism without the father' might look like." (72)

 

I have to admit, I wasn't expecting that and I'm not sure I entirely understand what this means or implies (is it okay to admit that my knowledge of Spinoza is limited?).

 

What he seems to mean is something like this: what we need to do today is make the move from a sad and depressive individualism to collective action; i.e., something more communal and joyous. 

 

Neoliberalism treats people not only as individuals but as infants whose behaviour needs to be modified not with reference to a moral system of right and wrong, but with reference to their own health and safety. They also need to be told not what to think - because nobody has to think anymore in an age of artificial intelligence - but what to feel.  

 

Unfortunately, having always to be constantly concerned about one's health and safety and sign one's emails with virtual hugs 'n' kisses, results in increased anxiety which leads to mental health issues. The Spinozist alternative, which breaks us out of such upbeat narcissism, encourages us to actually connect with others - whatever the risks and whatever the drawbacks (other people can be irritating and boring; they can be unpleasant and make miserable). 

 

But it's still better to fall in love and become an active member of society than fall into solipsistic isolation; the Covid pandemic illustrated that, one might have imagined. Ultimately, it's all about constructing collective agency rather than just an individual identity. Freedom - or perhaps it would be better to say fulfilment - comes when you are no longer trapped within your self. 

 

And from this line of thought, Fisher comes to the following conclusion: "The Marxist Supernanny would not only be the one who laid down limitations" (76), but also the one who encouraged us to take risks and seek out the strange (or that which is not-self). 

 

It would, if you like, be a slightly less stuffy version of Auntie Beeb - and acid communism doesn't just call for wild and colourful countercultural experimentation, but a revival of "the supposedly stodgy, centralized culture of the postwar consensus" (76). 

 

Fisher thus moves from Gothic materialism and cyber-punk [e] to public-service broadcasting - which is certainly quite a leap and not one I'm sure I wish to make. Unlike Fisher, I have always hated the BBC - even as a young child. But he insists that the effect of "permanent structural instability [...] is invariably stagnation and conservatism, not innovation", whilst, on the other hand, it's the BBC and Channel 4 that will perplex and delight with "popular avant gardism" (76). 

 

This might seem like a paradox, but Fisher is insistent: "This is not a paradox." (76) The fear and cynicism that come to define late capitalism - including the creative sector - always produce conformist and conventional shit in the end; whereas a certain amount of stability is "necessary for cultural vibrancy" (77). 

 

Whatever else he may or may not be, Fisher is not an anarchist who wishes to smash the state; nor is he an old school socialist who dreams of taking over the state and ever-expanding its size and reach. What he wants - and what he calls on his comrades on the more acidic wing of politics to do - is subordinate the state to the general will: 

 

"This involves, naturally, resuscitating the very concept of the general will, reviving - and modernizing - the idea of a public space that is not reducible to an aggregation of individuals and their interests." (77) 

 

And so, just like that, Fisher again reveals his Rousseauist roots [f]. One half-expects him to begin speaking about enforced freedom and the need for grand narratives. And sure enough ...

 

"Against the postmodernist suspicion of grand narratives, we need to reassert that, far from being isolated, contingent problems [violent teen crime; hospital superbugs, etc.], these are all the effects of a single systemic cause: Capital." (77) 

 

Thus, as well as subordinating the state to the general will, Fisher's neocommunists need to develop strategies against Capital; I refer you to the Lawrence poem quoted above in section III and, if you want, click here for a musical bonus: Killing Joke, 'Money Is Not Our God' [g].     

 

 

V. 

 

Despite Killing Joke releasing their thirteenth studio album - Absolute Dissent - in 2010 and despite the financial crisis two years prior to that, the world kept turning and capitalist realism didn't collapse. In fact: 

 

"It quickly became clear that, far from constituting the end of capitalism, the bank bail-outs were a massive reassertion of the capitalist realist insistence that there is no alternative. Allowing the banking system to disintegrate was held to be unthinkable, and what ensued was a vast haemorrhaging of public money into private hands." (78)  

 

No wonder those who, like Fisher, hoped capitalism might not simply be exposed and discredited but deposed and demolished, were quickly disappointed. 

 

They seemed willing to suffer a second 1920s style Great Depression, but, in the end, had to make do with their own personal forms of depression and concede that without a "credible and coherent alternative [...] capitalist realism will continue to rule the political-economic unconscious" (78).       

 

Still, not wanting to end on a defeatist note, Fisher tries to rally his troops with the hope that "it is year zero again, and a space has been cleared for a new anti-capitalism to emerge which is not necessarily tied to the old language or traditions" (78) of the left. 

 

That just seems naively optimistic (and in political bad taste) to me - there is no year zero - it's a mythical point that Buddhists and Khmer Rouge militants might base their calendars on, but Fisher should know better than to flirt with such rhetoric.   

 

I also wish he would refrain from calling for authentic universality - a phrase that he has possibly picked up from that old fraud Slavoj Žižek and by which he appears to return us to humanism - although I'm sure his defenders would insist appearances can be deceptive and that, actually, Fisher is proposing a new, post-humanist (as well as post-capitalist) form of solidarity (i.e., a model that differs entirely from old school metaphysical humanism).  

 

Nevertheless, it's a problematic phrase to say the least ... [h]

 

 

VI. 

 

I think I noted earlier in this post that I didn't know - and never even met - Mark Fisher. So I rely for insights into his character upon his friends, colleagues, students, etc. 

 

Individuals such as Tariq Goddard, for example, who provides the 2022 edition of Capitalist Realism with an Afterword, in which he tells us that Fisher was a somewhat manic individual who alternated between "the certainty that the finished work would be a portent of good things to come and an intermittent panic [...] based largely on the fear that he had written too little, too late" (82).

 

Goddard also informs us that Fisher was unburdened by false modesty and full of messianic zeal and something of this comes across, I think, in the final pages when Fisher boldly tells those on the left what their vices and failings are - "endless rehearsal of historical debates" (78) - and what they must do to be more successful; plan and organise for a future they really believe in.

 

He continues:

 

"The failure of previous forms of anti-capitalist political organisation should not be a cause for despair, but what needs to be left behind is a certain romantic attachment to the politics of failure, to the comfortable position of a defeated marginality." (78-79)

 

Fisher, in other words, does not like the embracing of victimhood or those who are defeatist by nature. Nor does he have much time for those who might reject his thinking:

 

"It is crucial that a genuine revitalised left confidently occupy the new political terrain I have (very provisionally) sketched here." (79) 

 

And crucial also that they do two things: firstly, "convert widespread mental health problems from medicalized conditions into effective antagonisms" (80); and, secondly, impose a new austerity in order to avoid environmental catastrophe and because limitations placed on desire are a good thing per se (as shown by Oliver James and Supernanny). 

 

To which we can only reply: Tak tochno, tovarishch Fisher!

 

  

Notes

 

[a] I'm using the 2022 edition of Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, published by Zer0 Books, and all page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.  

 

[b] Hyperthymesia - also known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) - is an extremely rare condition causing individuals to vividly recall nearly every event of their lives in minute detail (not only what they felt, but what they were wearing and had for lunch on any specific date). Such individuals - and there are believed to be only a hundred in the entire world - often find it hard to forget unpleasant memories or trauma, which can make it difficult to move past negative experiences.   

      Interestingly, Fisher is more concerned with another memory disorder - anterograde amnesia, i.e., the impaired ability to form new long-term memories, whilst past memories remain intact; "the new therefore looms up as hostile, fleeting, unnavigable, and the sufferer is drawn back to the security of the old" (60). For Fisher, this is the postmodern condition defined. 

 

[c] Fisher refers readers to Kafka's novel The Castle (1926), in which K's encounter with the telephone system is "uncannily prophetic of the call centre experience" (64). 

      He then explains what it is that makes Kafka so important as a writer: "The supreme genius of Kafka was to have explored the negative atheology proper to Capital: the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there - it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility." (65) 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, 'Kill Money', in Pansies (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1929), p. 93. 

      Lawrence maintained a vehement hatred of money throughout his writing; see for example his essay 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine' (1925) in which he writes: 

      "Our last wall is the golden wall of money. This is a fatal wall. It cuts us off from life, from vitality, from the alive sun and the alive earth, as nothing can. Nothing, not even the most fanatical dogmas of an iron-bound religion, can insulate us from the inrush of life and inspiration, as money can."

      I'm not entirely sure I agree with this; I would certainly rather live in California, or Switzerland - or even Felixstowe - than Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban, or Iran under the rule of the Supreme Leader. 

      Lawrence's essay can be found in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lines quoted are on p. 363. 

 

[e] Mark Fisher's Ph.D thesis was titled Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (University of Warwick, 1999). It argued that cyberpunk fiction and cybernetic technologies are collapsing the distinctions between life/non-life and human/machine into a flat ontology; what he thought of as a form of Gothic materialism, in which traditional ideas of agency dissolve. 

      As for cyberpunk, Fisher analysed this genre of writing not merely as a type of fiction commenting on reality, but as hyperrealist theory-fiction that acted as an extension of the real world and as a guide to 'the increasingly strange terrain of capitalism'. The name of his long-running blog, k-punk (2004-2016), is CCRU shorthand for cyber-punk; the k stands for the Greek spelling of the term cyber (κυβερ). 

      Flatline Constructs was published in book form by Exmilitary in 2018 and K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, ed., Darren Ambrose, was also published in 2018 (Repeater Books). It brings together some of the best posts from his seminal blog along with a selection of reviews and other writings, including his (unfinished) introduction to a planned work to be called 'Acid Communism'. 

 

[f] Readers may recall that Rousseau is the philosopher most famously associated with the concept of la volonté générale, which he examined in The Social Contract (1762). It represents the collective, common interest of the citizens aimed at the public good, rather than the sum of individual selfish interests. Anyone who refused to obey the general will would be forced to do so.         

 

[g] Killing Joke, 'Money Is Not Our God', was a single released (Jan 1991) from the album Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions (Noise Records, 1990). Written by Jaz Coleman, Geordie Walker, and Martin Atkins. 

      It failed to chart, but it's a track which all those who hate Mammon will appreciate. I'm not sure they were one of Fisher's favourite bands, but he acknowledges Killing Joke as significant post-punk pioneers who not only challenged the musical and cultural norms of the period, but fostered counter-consensual collectivity, providing an exit from the present and a will to retake the present.

     If interested, see what he writes about them on his k-punk blog and in the book Post-Punk Then and Now, ed. Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher (Repeater Books, 2016).   

[h] Fisher obviously isn't a traditional humanist; he doesn't subscribe to ideas of a fixed human nature (or some kind of metaphysical essence) existing outside of culture and history. 

      And so, I suppose authentic universality has to be thought of as a collective (or mass) political project designed to counter forms of suffering that global capitalism produces. Nevertheless, I still dislike the term and still think it lends itself to idealism.      

 

 

On Spinoza's Four Great Disciples

Les quatre grands disciples de Spinoza

(Nietzsche - Lawrence - Kafka - Artaud)

 

I. 

 

Spinoza is one of those philosophers I have never read and about whom my knowledge is extremely limited: I know, for example, that he was a 17th-century Dutch thinker of Portuguese-Jewish origin and a founding figure of the Enlightenment who preferred to earn his living as a lens grinder, rather than accept an academic post that might compromise his intellectual independence. 

 

I also know that he rejected the idea of free will and divine judgement and argued for a kind of pantheistic monism (i.e., the belief that God and Nature are one and the same identical and infinite substance). Such thinking made him a controversial figure at the time and and a thorn in the side of the religious authorities. 

 

Finally, I know that Deleuze was a great admirer; that Spinoza was the thinker who provided him with the basis for his own work on immanence and encouraged a joyful affirmation of life free from belief in a world beyond, or tedious moral concepts that always terminate in judgement and punishment.  

 

For Deleuze, Spinoza was le prince de philosophes and he had four great heirs or disciples: Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kakfa, and Artaud [1]. The question that interests me here, however, is not how or why Deleuze arrives at this conclusion, but what did each of these four think of the renegade Jew who gave us modernity ...? [2]

 

II.  

 

Let's work backwards and begin with Artaud, who, as far as I'm aware, never mentioned Spinoza in his writings, suggesting that the link between the two is something formed almost exclusively in Deleuze's philosophical imagination. 

 

Deleuze (and Guattari) may like to think of Spinoza's Ethics (1667) as anticipating Artaud's notion of the body without organs, but that's not something that ever occured to the French dramatist who introduced the world to the theatre of cruelty. 

 

Indeed, according to one scholar, Artaud's work is ultimately incompatible with Spinoza's rationalism [3]. For whereas Artaud aims to liberate libidinal energy and resist the body's rational organ-isation, Spinoza, in contrast, wished to perfect man via reason and an active form of knowledge. Both spoke about joy and passion, but each conceived such terms in radically different ways.    

 

 

III. 

 

Unlike Artaud, Franz Kafka apparently did acknowledge his indebtedness to Spinoza - even if he didn't do so in his published writings - considering him a spiritual mentor during his younger years when part of an intellectual circle in Prague which often discussed the Dutchman's work [4].

 

Kafka was particularly interested in Spinoza's notion of an indifferent deity; i.e., one who was blind to the suffering of humanity. This idea shaped Kafka's construction of an amoral fictional universe in which there is ultimately no justice, despite all the mechanisms of law and order put in place by mankind.      

 

 

IV.

 

Amusingly, one commentator has described Lawrence as a "sort of sexy Spinozist" [5], which I think is pushing things a bit too far, even if it's fair to say that Lawrence's own thinking does align in certain key aspects with Spinoza's philosophy. 

 

For example, Lawrence's model of pantheism which insists that God exists only in bodies; or his concept of blood-knowledge, which has echoes of Spinoza's intuitive science (a third way of knowing beyond imagination and reason which allows one to grasp the essence of things and experience a sense of blessedness or oneness with the universe).     

 

But again, as with Kafka and Artaud, there is hardly a mention of Spinoza in any of Lawrence's writings; the only one I can recall from memory is in the short prose piece 'Books' in which he dismisses him as another of those philosophers who, like Kant, only thought "with his head and his spirit" (and never with his blood) [6]. 

 

 

V. 

 

Finally, we arrive at Nietzsche  ... 

 

And finally we find actual written references to Spinoza that we are able to cite, such as the postcard sent to his friend Franz Overbeck in the summer of 1881, in which Nietzsche expresses his astonishment and delight at having found a precursor - i.e., someone in whose work he recognises himself, even if, due to differences in time and culture, there remained certain important points of divergence [7]. 

 

In the Genealogy (II.15), meanwhile, Nietzsche acknowledges Spinoza's insight into (and the need to overcome) traditional moral concepts. Material found in his notebooks from this period also show Nietzsche turning to Spinoza for ideas, particularly concerning the transformation of knowledge into a passion. 

 

Ultimately, Nietzsche saw in Spinoza someone who was able to think beyond good and evil - someone who scorned the teleological fantasy that the universe had some ultimate goal, or that man possessed free will.

 

Having said that, however, it's also true that Nietzsche viewed his own concept of will to power as superior and more radical than Spinoza's insistence that life strove above all for its own preservation. And in his mature (some might say mad) Dionysian phase, it's hard to believe that Nietzsche would have had much time for Spinoza's defence of reason as the essential human faculty leading to freedom.       

 

 

VI.

 

In sum: whilst Deleuze isn't simply joking or trying to be provocative by grouping together Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud as disciples of Spinoza, we need to take this idea with a pinch of salt and remember that none of the above saw themselves as such. 

 

Essentially, Deleuze was highlighting a number of conceptual connnections between them which might otherwise go unnoticed. He was probably also attempting to make Spinoza more relevant to a contemporary readership and, perhaps, inseminate Spinoza with his own ideas. 

 

Thus, it might be best to think of Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud, and Deleuze himself as a line of thinkers who share common ground with Spinoza, but are not followers per se (more like fellow travellers); artist-philosophers who above all else want to have done with judgement.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the essay 'To Have Done with Judgement', in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Sith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 126-135. 

      According to Deleuze, it was not Kant but Spinoza who, in breaking with the Judeo-Christian tradition, carried out a true critique of judgement and had "four great disciples to take it up again and push it further: Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud" (126). 

 

[2] This description was coined by the American philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein and formed the subtitle of her biographical study Betraying Spinoza (Random House, 2006). 

 

[3] See Jon K. Shaw, 'Athleticism Is Not Joy: Extricating Artaud from Deleuze's Spinoza', in Deleuze Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, (Edinburgh University Press, May 2016), pp. 162-185. 

      As Shaw writes in the Abstract to this essay, "much of Artaud's metaphysics is incompatible with Deleuze's Spinozism, not least the relation between a body and its constitutive outside, and the questions of affect and expression": click here. 

 

[4] In the absence of direct references to Spinoza in Kafka's writings, we have to rely on biographical studies and scholarly analysis to confirm the latter's interest in (and sense of kinship with) the former. I'm not sure I'd speak of parallel destinies between the two, however, although that's the argument put forward by Carlos García Durazo in his essay on Medium (24 Oct 2024): click here. 

 

[5] See Mattie Colquhoun, 'Rainbows: From D. H. Lawrence to the NHS', on Xenogothic (23 Dec 2020): click here.  

 

[6] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Books', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 198. 

 

[7] Nietzsche, postcard to Franz Overbeck (30 July, 1881). It can be read (in English translation) on The Nietzsche Channel: click here. 

      It is interesting to note that Nietzsche doesn't simply identify with Spinoza because of certain shared ideas, but also because the latter was, due to his radicalism, very much a maligned and marginalised figure in his own day (much as Nietzsche felt himself to be in modern Germany). 

      It is also important to remember that Nietzsche's understanding of Spinoza was mostly based on his reading of secondary sources, such as Kuno Fischer's highly influential six-volume study Geschichte der neuern Philosophie ['History of Modern Philosophy'] (1854-1877). 

      See Andreas Urs Sommer, 'Nietzsche's Readings on Spinoza: A Contextualist Study, Particularly on the Reception of Kuno Fischer', in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Autumn, 2012), pp. 156-184. This essay is available on JSTOR: click here.