Matt Colquhoun – författare

Edited and with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun, this collection of lecture notes and transcriptions reveals acclaimed writer and blogger Mark Fisher in his element — the classroom — outlining a project that Fisher's death left so bittersweetly unfinished.Beginning with that most fundamental of questions — "Do we really want what we say we want?" — Fisher explores the relationship between desire and capitalism, and wonders what new forms of desire we might still excavate from the past, present, and future. From the emergence and failure of the counterculture in the 1970s to the continued development of his left-accelerationist line of thinking, this volume charts a tragically interrupted course for thinking about the raising of a new kind of consciousness, and the cultural and political implications of doing so.For Fisher, this process of consciousness raising was always, fundamentally, psychedelic — just not in the way that we might think...

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 Fisher's 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 "egress" as its starting point-a 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 fiction-Egress considers the politics of death and community in a way that is indebted to Fisher's own forms of cultural criticism, ruminating on personal experience in the hope of making it productively impersonal.

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 Durer, Rembrandt and Caravaggio, through to photographers and celebrities like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, Lee Friedlander and Herve 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?