Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 8

The ’00s on Trial: The Dark Shimmer of Sex Appeal

As an short addendum to my recent posts on Mark Fisher and Russell Brand — here, here and here — I was reminded of this section from “Now Then, Now Then: Jimmy Savile and the ’70s on Trial”, a chapter in Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: By the end of 2012, the 70s was returning, […]

A Critique of Morality, or an Ethics of Critique?

At the risk of perpetuating Vampire Castle discourse, but in the spirit of blog dialogue, a recent response to my New Statesman essay can be found here. It concludes: Fisher’s celebration of Brand was, writes Colquhoun, due to his life-long fascination with “people who, at one time or another […] bridged the gap between the […]

Tic-Tac-Toe: Writers’ Blocks, Childhood Blocks

What follows is an attempt to get out of a writer’s block that has lingered in the drafts because it very much worked but now seems a little redundant as a result. Nonetheless, some things to get out of my head and on the screen… Tobi Haslett, “All the Images Will Disappear”: [Annie Ernaux is] […]

Consciousness Raising and #MeToo

In writing a short article for the New Statesman the other day, the short word count left me feeling a little anxious. It was hardly an opportunity to go into the weeds, but nonetheless an chance to point to some of Mark Fisher’s essays that I find useful right now, rather than an essay like […]

Mark Fisher was not Russell Brand: XG in the New Statesman

I’ve written a short essay for New Statesman today, which attempts to address the return of Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” to Twitter discourse, in light of the damning allegations made against Russell Brand. I try to offer a balanced reading of Mark’s essay, the problems with it (mainly Brand’s inclusion), whilst pointing readers […]

The Primal Wound: An Anti-Oedipal Consideration

This essay was originally published on lapsuslima.com in 2019. I am now extending it into a PhD project. Hoping to revisit it recently, I noticed the original page had gone down, so I thought I’d post it here for posterity and for my own reference. The map has started tearing along its creases due to […]

Trans-Lament 2

This Friday, I’ll be taking part in the second Trans-Lament at the Lubber Fiend in Newcastle. At the invitation of Kiik Amor, I’ll be trying out something new. To open the night, I will read John Donne’s 1633 poem “The Sun Rising”, followed by a poem of my own about Donne, Derek Jarman’s garden, the […]

Róisín Murphy Against Glampunk

The swirling backlashes kicked up around the “cancellation” of Róisín Murphy have been predictable and sad. As always happens when someone lands themselves in the daily news cycle for being transphobic, the TERFs of Twitter have been out in force to declare that #IStandWithRoisinMurphy. We all know the drill by now. As ever, most of […]

Is Another Narcissism Possible?: XG on Red Medicine

After hosting the first public reading from Narcissus in Bloom a few months ago, Sam Kelly and I had a further chat about the new book for his Red Medicine podcast. We talk about narcissism as pathology, its underappreciated political potentials, and other attempts at reclaiming the self and its world from the Stoics to […]

»Sehnsucht nach dem Kapitalismus«: Postcapitalist Desire in German

Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures of Mark Fisher, which I edited and introduced back in 2020, is getting a German translation from Brumaire in October 2023. This edition features new illustrations by Andy King and has been translated into German by Alexander Brentler. You can order it here via Jacobin. There are other translations also […]