Kodwo Eshun Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:07

  So it's been a year since we lost Mark and I know I speak for everyone in the department and I'm pretty sure everyone here and watching this when I say the pain is still very sharp. You know, we miss Mark every day. In fact, missing perhaps more actually each day. That has had such an impact on us as a department…

• 00:06:28

  for continuing to work in and with and away from and by way of Mark's writing and his thinking, a thinking which is inseparable from his enthusiasms, from his impassioned thought, from the polemical determination that he brought with him. This is a work that many of us have already embarked upon, a work that…

• 00:13:50

  How to metabolise this idea of the collective capacity to produce, to care, and to enjoy. The idea of red plenty, of commonwealth, that becomes a position that is lived, an attitude that is shared by those that wanted, by those that wished, by those of us that harbour a yearning to commit to themselves, to commit…

• 00:22:34

  A billion individuals. Each of these neologisms are actually forms of life. Each of them is the names of and for esthetico-political positions that operate by disagreements and differentiations that make claims that must be argued. Each of these is not so much a term as a war of and over interpretation. A stance that…

• 00:29:29

  I realised that Mark and I had a number of projects that we were discussing that we left incomplete. We talked about editing a book on Kanye about co-writing an essay on John O'Connor's The Unfinished Conversation about setting up an imprint called Redshift and after a while what I realised was that I would like…

• 00:41:04

  term of and for anti-blackness that operates in and through a system of predicates that supports the conceptualisation of the formation of cinema whose existence whose reasons for its existence supports itself the continual reinvention of the Negro and we can say that digital cinematography inherits the racial regimes…

• 00:47:10

  She is walking, trailed by police. The white wall painted lower half white, the upper half brown. It's 5th December, 1969. Deborah Johnson of the Chicago Chapter, of the Black Panther Party, for self-defense, is walking down a corridor, a courthouse or a police station. It is the morning after the Chicago Police have…

• 00:53:56

  I just want to sit like you all now and contemplate what you said. It's been an incredibly rich talk, a radical one, but also incredibly caring. So I think exactly what we need on a day like this, basically. We asked Koto before whether he wants questions afterwards and he actually invited questions, thoughts…