Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and the Fisher-Function

by Matt Colquhoun

Overview

An exploration of the work and legacy of Mark Fisher, one of the most influential and incendiary writers of our generation.

Egress is the first book to consider the legacy and work of the writer, cultural critic and cult academic Mark Fisher.

Narrated in orbit of his death as experienced by a community of friends and students in 2017, it analyses Fisher's philosophical trajectory, from his days as a PhD student at the University of Warwick to the development of his unfinished book on Acid Communism.

Taking the word "egress" as its starting point—a word used by Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie to describe an escape from present circumstances as experiences by the characters in countless examples of weird fiction—Egress consider the politics of death and community in a way that is indebted to Fisher's own forms of cultural criticism, ruminating on personal experience in the hope of making it productively impersonal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912248872
Publisher:	Watkins Media
Publication date:	03/10/2020
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Matt Colquhoun is a writer and photographer from Hull, East Yorkshire. He currently lives in London and blogs at xenogothic.com.

Table of Contents

0 The Fisher-Function 1

1 Into the Weird 21

2 Reaching Beyond to the Other 69

3 Mental Health Asteroid 105

4 Unconsciousness Raising 131

5 Friends, Communities & Ghosts 181

6 Acid 233

7 An Afterword - A Lesson 255

8 An Addendum - An Egress 265

Images 267

Notes 269

Acknowledgements 298

Editorial Reviews

A remarkable interlacing of ambitious theoretical enquiry and raw personal memoir, Egress asks why collective thought and practice today is so broken that it takes a lacerating calamity to rediscover something like community. This is a work of thought in motion and in emotion, searching, deeply wounded but undefeated.” — Robin Mackay, Urbanomic

"The dead return to us as our world falls apart. Love and loss ripple into our lives and test our integrity every day. Brutal and provocative, this book is a haunting elegy to Mark’s crystalline mind. He sat on the shores of endless worlds" — Mark Stewart, The Pop Group

“Through his Xenogothic blog, and now this often touching book, few have done as much to channel, ruminate around and speculate beyond the spectre of Mark Fisher.” — Steve Goodman (Kode9)

"Egress is a remarkable (and inventive) tribute to Mark Fisher's capacities as a thinker, writer, and, perhaps most importantly, teacher. Filled with brilliant new insights into Mark's philosophies and contexts, Matt Colquhoun's book is at once a moving, deeply human act of mourning, as well as a call-to-arms to bring forward the future that Mark's writings make possible."— Hua Hsu, The New Yorker 

"By turns a deeply personal memoir, a scholarly and readable introduction to Mark Fisher’s work, and a powerful extension of the apparatus of Fisher’s thought to new application. Colquhoun perfectly captures the feeling of despair in a time when political and personal hopelessness is ubiquitous, but shows a way through it… this work is very necessary now. This book illuminates the important work of trying to figure out how to mourn: privately, publicly, personally, institutionally, politically…while maintaining a deep connection to Fisher’s work and a respect for the tools it can give us to make it through." — Michelle Spiedel

"Colquhoun shuttles along the filaments of Mark Fisher's work with scholarly and deeply personal insights offering not only an introduction to his thought but a sense how we might apply it in the contemporary moment. I can't recommend this book enough." — Laura Grace Ford, author of Savage Messiah

From the Publisher