Hanter les « désirs post-capitalistes » de Mark Fisher

In the autumn of 2016, at Goldsmiths, University of London, cultural theorist and music critic Mark Fisher initiated a course entitled Post-Capitalist Desires. Post-Capitalist Desires brought together—or rather, attempted to resurrect, in order to put them into practice—currents of critical thought and emancipatory movements (the Frankfurt School, feminism, the counterculture of the 1970s, the labour movement, Occupy Wall Street). The aim was to imagine ways out of capitalist alienation: it was a course marked both by profound melancholy and a strange optimism.
Mark Fisher taught only five of the fifteen sessions that had been planned: the seminar was interrupted by his suicide on January 13, 2017. The five sessions, and the lively discussions that took place between the group and their teacher, were recorded by Fisher’s students. These recordings were subsequently transcribed, translated, and published (in 2021 in the English edition, and in 2025 in the French edition). They constitute a record of an extraordinarily vibrant intellectual, pedagogical, and collective activity, and today, in 2026, they are available to be brought back to life and put back into circulation.
The starting point for Haunting Mark Fisher’s Post-Capitalist Desires is precisely these sessions, taught exactly ten years ago, and the desire to breathe new life into them and set them back in motion. The transcriptions of this course, which reach us like voices from a recent but vanished past—not quite voices from beyond the grave, but almost—will therefore be read, studied, repeated, imitated, understood, misunderstood, debated, contradicted, loved, rejected, and reenacted, all collectively.
Because Haunting Mark Fisher’s Post-Capitalist Desires is also, and above all, the collective making of a film in which we will embody the ghosts of this very recent past, the revenants of these ideas and intellectual and pedagogical activities. You do not need to be an actor, filmmaker, or theorist to participate, but rather to ask ourselves, out loud: What has changed in ten years? What has gotten worse? What might actually be better than it was ten years ago? How have certain concepts (such as accelerationism) and certain proposals (such as universal basic income, or the idea of mechanizing large sectors of production in order to emancipate workers and give them back their free time) evolved? Who has appropriated or captured some of these ideas? Where does capitalism stand today? And where do art schools and universities more generally, mental health, culture, and technology stand? What did Mark Fisher die from?
Haunting Mark Fisher’s Post-Capitalist Desires is not a theoretical course: it is a messy homage, a disrespectful commemoration, an exercise in melancholic imitation, an awkward interpretation. Above all, it is an invocation of a very recent past and of a major intellectual figure of the twenty-first century.
Alongside the transcription of the five sessions of the 2016 course, we will draw on a whole body of material for this experiment: texts by Mark Fisher and other authors, video and audio recordings of his lectures, music playlists, films, all of which will fill the space of this seminar, which is also a film set, since all our class sessions will be filmed.
The method: gothic make-up sessions; creating a filming space that intertwines past and present; collective close readings in the form of arpentage; readings for the camera; lots of discussion; video recordings of our working sessions; screenings of archival footage of lectures and conferences, feature films, and music videos; and invitations to other theorists and readers of Fisher.
There may be clumsiness, approximation, or even grotesqueness in this sincere attempt at artificial resuscitation.

PROGRAMME FOR THE FIRST-SEMESTER SESSIONS
Tuesday, October 13, 2:00–8:00 PM
Introduction to the work of Mark Fisher
Collective development of a methodology and a filming setup/device for the film.
Tuesday, November 3, 2:00–8:00 PM
What is Post-Capitalism?
Readings:
Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (excerpts), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, 2015, pp. 107–127
Affects and Emotions for a Postcapitalist Politics (excerpts), J.K. Gibson-Graham, 2006, pp. 1–22
Les prophètes du postcapitalisme (excerpts), Paul Mason, 2015, pp. 171–220
With the participation of Clémence Agnez, philosopher, teacher, and exhibition curator (to be confirmed).
Tuesday, November 17, 2:00–8:00 PM
A Psychological Revolution of Almost Inconceivable Magnitude
Readings:
The Family: Love it or Leave it (excerpts), Ellen Willis, 2012, pp. 149–168
The Dialectic of Civilization (excerpts), Herbert Marcuse, 1963, pp. 76–98
Thursday, December 3, 2:00–8:00 PM
From Class Consciousness to Group Consciousness
Readings:
The Proletariat’s Point of View (excerpts), Georg Lukàcs, 1960, pp. 189–256
The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism (excerpts), Nancy C. Hartsock, 1998, pp. 105–132
Wednesday, December 9, 2:00–8:00 PM
Trade Union Power, Spiritual Power
Reading:
Old Fashioned Heroes of the New Working Class (excerpts), Jefferson Cowie, 2010, pp. 23–75
Tuesday, January 12, 2:00–8:00 PM
Libidinal Marxism
Reading:
Le désir nommé Marx (excerpts), Jean-François Lyotard, 1974, pp. 117–188
With the participation of Quentin Dubois, philosopher, teacher, and founder of Trou Noir, Revue de la Dissidence Sexuelle.
Wednesday, January 13, 6:00–10:00 PM
Organization of a party to commemorate the anniversary of Mark Fisher’s disappearance.