A desire beyond capitalism

Before the Christmas holiday of 2016, Mark Fisher gave his students at Goldsmiths University the fifth lecture out of fifteen lectures he had decided upon himself. No one expected that the fifth would be the last, as the course abruptly ended tragically when the British blogger and theorist (1968-2017) took his own life, leaving his book "Hallucination of Communism" unfinished. This book contains those final lectures, which Fisher began by questioning the meaning of "post-capitalism," and continued to trace the relationship between desire and capitalism, stopping at Freud, Marcuse, Lukács, and Luhmann. We hear Fisher's voice sometimes despairing, sometimes seeking hope, reclaiming the legacy of counterculture from the seventies, and contemplating the ghost of a world that could have been free. The lectures are left as they are; we hear Fisher's laughter, interrupting his students, shifting seats, opening the door, to live the realistic atmosphere of the course that raised problematic theoretical and historical questions related to our current era.