Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

by Mark Fisher

Depressive ontology is dangerously seductive because, as the zombie twin of a certain philosophical wisdom, it is half true. As the depressive withdraws from the vacant confections of the lifeworld, he unwittingly finds himself in concordance with the human condition so painstakingly diagrammed by a philosopher like Spinoza: he sees himself as a serial consumer of empty simulations, a junky hooked on every kind of deadening high, a meat puppet of the passions. The depressive cannot even lay claim to the comforts that a paranoiac can enjoy, since he cannot believe that the strings are being pulled by any one. No flow, no connectivity in the depressive’s nervous system. ‘Watch from the wings as the scenes were replaying’, go the fatalistic lines in ‘Decades’, and Curtis wrote with a depressive’s iron certainty about life as some pre-scripted film. His voice – from the very start terrifying in its fatalism, in its acceptance of the worst – sounds like the voice of man who is already dead, or who has entered an appalling state of suspended animation, death-within-life.