HEMLOCK HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: HAUNTOLOGY - Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, Left Melancholia, the Arab Spring, Walter Benjamin, and the Slow Cancellation of the Future (H33)

Even the dead are not safe.

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” This statement, deliberately provocative, was made first by Continental philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard before its later canonization by Mark Fisher in his 2009 theoretical masterpiece Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?. For Fisher, it is a call to action, and a structuring limit. Strictly speaking, it is probably an overstatement, at least without the implicit qualifier:

As long as things continue as they have up until now.

This is the statement: that our world is more likely to collapse from trophic exhaustion, reactive warfare, and molecular violence, than it is to shed capitalist practices and norms in favor of any of the many proposed alternatives. This same thought was expressed in another form - a case of convergent evolution emanating elsewhere in the landscape of literary Quotatia - humanity will go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.

Advisory: discussion of death and suicide.

References, Media Usage, and Sources:

"NO" by Joy Harjo - September 2004

"Resisting Left Melancholy" by Wendy Brown

NB: If you cannot access this, try using sci-hub.se

"Theses on the Philosophy of History" by Walter Benjamin - 1940

Cover Art: "Smoldering Ghost: Happy Painting" by Michael Prettyman

Ambience Tracks (Creative Commons) from Nemo's Dreamscapes

Outro Song: Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 30, Movement 3, performed by Anastasia Huppmann (Creative Commons, YouTube)

Excerpt from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson.

Ode to Mark Fisher: Part 1 - Introduction to Fisherology (Hemlock Substack)