Quotes from Mark Fisher

A Scanner Darkly' is one of Dick's bleakest novels, and almost certainly his saddest.

Roxy Music' and 'For Your Pleasure,' those exercises in learning and unlearning of accent and manners, are Pop's equivalent of 'The Talented Mr Ripley.' The clothes , the bearing and the voice are faked, but not yet perfectly.

Abduction was what it felt like on first listening to Public Enemy. Like the post-punks, Public Enemy implicitly accepted the idea that a politics which came reassuringly dressed in established forms would be self-defeating.

I loathe my name because it is mine and also because it is not mine; it is at once too intimate and seems to have no connection with me. Perhaps because the name is quite common, it never seems to fit me, or fit me alone. Nevertheless, when I see the name, I always feel a peculiar sense of shame.

When The Fall pummeled their way into my nervous system, circa 1983, it was as if a world that was familiar - and which I had thought too familiar, too quotidian to feature in rock - had returned, expressionistically transfigured, permanently altered.

Under neoliberal governance, workers have seen their wages stagnate and their working conditions and job security become more precarious.

While football embarrassingly exposes the excesses of capitalism, the Olympic sports have been used to propagate the neoliberal mantra that success is simply a matter of hard work.

The point is always made that capitalism is efficient, people say 'You might not like it, but it works.' But Britain is not efficient.

There is no need to subject people in capitalism to additional suffering; the point is to get them to recognize that the suffering they are already undergoing is caused by capitalism.

There is no opposition between efficiency and justice; on the contrary, an institution run by those who actually do the work is likely to be more effective than one run by interchangeable exploiters who often lack any specific expertise in what they are supposedly managing.

It will come as no surprise that I would count Nietzsche the perspectivist - he who questioned not only the possibility but the value of Truth - as the enemy. There will be even fewer surprises that I would reject the Dionysian Nietzsche, the celebrant of transgressive desire.

Children of Men' reinforces what few would doubt, but which British cinema would seldom lead you to suspect: the British landscape bristles with cinematic potential.

The sustaining fantasy of Nolan's Batman films - which does chime uncomfortably with Romney -is that the excesses of finance capital can be curbed by a combination of philanthropy, off-the-books violence and symbolism.

There's always been a nasty strain of class prejudice ingrained in the condemnation of football's 'undeserving rich,' as if the working class is uniquely susceptible to being corrupted by money, and as if they deserve their wealth less than those born to it.

In 'A Scanner Darkly,' as in 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,' all intersubjective relations devolve into webs of suspicion and betrayal.

In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.

Just because something is current doesn't mean it is new.

Nietzsche should not be taken seriously as a political theorist, at least not at the level of his positive prescriptions. But the Nietzsche who denounces the insipidity and mediocrity that result from democracy's levelling impulses could not be more acute.

Postmodernism is, of course, the dead end from which hauntology starts - but one of its role is to denaturalise what postmodernism has taken for granted, to conceive of postmodernism as a condition in the sense of a sickness.

Neoliberalism emerged by defining itself against what it labelled as an unrealistic and unsustainable programme of social welfare and public spending.

In a world of niches, we are enchained by our own consumer preferences.

What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?

We once turned to popular culture because it produced fantasy objects; now, we are asked to 'identify with' the fantasising subject itself.

I'm the world's greatest apologist for Brian De Palma but his version of Ellroy's 'The Black Dahlia' is a disaster.