kpunk


Such passages, along with others from earlier pieces in the collection, now make for difficult reading. A personal essay published in 2014 describes the ways in which Fisher felt his depression was entangled with his experience of social hierarchy, orienting around the sense of worthlessness that he felt had been bred into him, as well as the pain of finding himself between classes. Both, he writes, left him with the sense of being ‘good for nothing’.footnote68 The impress of this can also be found in his cultural criticism, in descriptions of ‘rage, confusion and embarrassment’, of ‘the painful drama of becoming something you are not’.footnote69 A cogent critic of the ways in which social and political problems are reduced to personal pathology, Fisher attributed the management of his depression to perceiving it in less individualized terms.footnote70 There is also a sense in which this provided a way to externalize his own suffering. The contemporary epoch in his diagnosis was essentially depressive—not only the deflated state of capitalist realism, but the state of the left, the public’s acceptance of austerity, the state of the nation. England in 2015, he wrote, is ‘possibly the most depressed country to ever exist on earth.’footnote71 The last, previously unpublished, blogpost nevertheless finds him unbowed. The tumultuous political developments of 2016 had demonstrated that the right ‘had retreated from its claim on modernity’—providing ‘all the more impetus for the left to reclaim it’.footnote72

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