Quotes from Mark Fisher

Affective exploitation is crucial to late capitalism.

The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.

Columbo's deliberately irritating questioning technique - 'just one more thing' - is designed to produce discomfort rather than to elicit information.

While the emphasis on effects became a catastrophe for science fiction, it was a relief for the capitalist culture of which 'Star Wars' became a symbol. Late capitalism can't produce many new ideas any more, but it can reliably deliver technological upgrades. But 'Star Wars' didn't really belong to the science fiction genre any way.

Identity politics is not politics at all, since it precisely negates the political as such by re-construing political positions in ethnic terms, subsuming 'ought' under 'is.'

We all know that the 'reality' of reality TV is an artful construction, an effect not only of editing but of a Lorenzian rat-in-a-mirrored-labyrinth artificial environment which attenuates psychology into a series of territorial twitches.

We're invited to believe that the worst effects of Stalinism arose from its 'dogmatic' intransigence; but it is precisely because so much was left open to interpretation that its Terror was so pervasive.

Structurally, as is evident, the role of the 'Islamic Terror' is to fill the gap left by the disintegration of Stalinism. That is why Saddam's quasi-Stalinist Baathist regime was the perfect transitional object for the U.S. in the immediate years after the Cold War ended. Saddam was no more a Muslim than Stalin was a Christian.

Most psychiatrists assume that mental illnesses such as depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, which can be treated by drugs. But most psychotherapy doesn't address the social causation of mental illness either.

Although it was published in 1977, "A Scanner Darkly's" mood is already postpunk.

What many students most want from college, although they would never admit it, is an authority structure. There is a demand for an authority which they can then reject; they want to be told what to do, so they can disobey. It is a textbook case of bad faith, a flight from freedom.

The neoliberal policies implemented first by the Thatcher governments in the 1980s and continued by New Labour and the current coalition have resulted in a privatisation of stress.

De Palma's great theme, obsessively reiterated, is betrayal.

The paradoxical War on Terror is based on a kind of willed stupidity; the willed stupidity of wishful thinking. Only the logic of dreamwork can suture 'War' with 'Terror' in this way, since terrorists were, by classical definition, those without 'legitimate authority' to wage war.

Pele featured in the Brazilophile imaginary as the a figure of non-utile excess, a carefree artist in the Nietzschean sense, indifferent to the narrow teleology of winning matches... check the way that most of the endlessly replayed footage we see of Pele is not of him scoring goals, but audaciously missing chances contrived by force of wit.

Anti-capitalism is nothing new in Hollywood. From 'Wall-E' to 'Avatar,' corporations are routinely depicted as evil. The contradiction of corporate-funded films denouncing corporations is an irony capitalism cannot just absorb, but thrive on. Yet this anti-capitalism is only allowed within limits.

Christopher Nolan's 'The Prestige' is an enthralling study of doubles, doubling and duplicity. Its twinned themes are obsession and the Secret: the Secret as objet-a, that which inspires, but which can never satisfy, obsession.

I'm not sure that Liberation Theology has ever satisfactorily resolved the tensions between Marxism's 'social naturalism' (the claim that all beliefs have their origins in social practice) and religion's supernaturalism (the claims that its beliefs are underwritten by divine will).

Crucially, Marxist atheism is only achieved once the theological critique of capitalism is completed. This is what separates Marxist atheism from the gliberal platitudes of the likes of Nick Cohen, who proclaim secularism while remaining attached to the theology of capital (liberal commonsense).

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.

In the classic 70s episodes, Columbo is rarely seen on his own. We typically do not see Columbo 'for himself,' only for the criminal, leaving the possibility that the entire Columbo persona - his shambling manner, his absent mindedness, even his references to his wife - may all be a performance designed to disarm the murderer.

Jetsetting is now not the privilege of the elite so much as a veritiginous mundanity for a permanently dispossessed global workforce.

The vast numbers of people who suffer some kind of mental illness under capitalism can either think, 'there is some failing with me, if only I could fit into this system better, if only I were working harder, if only I could enjoy these empty pleasures more, then things would be OK' or 'the problem is with the system that is making me ill.'

What better example than the World Cup is there of the fact that individual people are irrelevant while impersonal structures are invariant?