Mark Fisher - Anti-Vital (edited and remastered for listenability)

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: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). 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.

• 00:00:00

  Okay, so it's not super organized, and Mike, I'm not going to laugh at it today. But, I mean, what I want to talk about really is to talk about Nick Land, probably in relation to what had preceded him, and the kind of canon of thought that was kind of excavated and repotentiated in the 90s, and then the relation…

• 00:05:52

  Somehow, there's a... There's a propensity of creativity to just emerge. It will just emerge. If the blockages which obstruct it are removed without the least effort. And this text is interesting because it's a reading of... It's partly a reading of fascism, but there's a different account of fascism. And in Making…

• 00:12:39

  And those of you who know Beyond the Pleasure Principle are familiar with this astonishing kind of retro-speculative fiction that Freud produces in the text, whereby he gives an account of the emergence of interiority as such. How did the basic distinction, fundamental to organisms and therefore to the organic…

• 00:18:19

  Chronogenous machines engage in their own assembly. Sort of the next paragraph, desire machines are assemblages of flows, switches, and loops, connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive syntheses, implementing the machine unconscious as a nonlinear pragmatics of flux. Now, this is from a slightly later essay. This…

• 00:24:58

  You know, it has to be about individuals. You know, it has to be about human individuals. You know, I mean, neoliberalism is, in that sense, a true liberalism. You know, at least if we take it on its own terms. We take it on its terms as a philosophy rather than a political project. We take it as a political project…

• 00:30:05

  These are from two separate sections of the book. No need to do a critique of metaphysics or of political economy, which is the same thing. Since critique presupposes and ceaselessly creates this very theatricality. Rather, be inside and forget it. That's the position of the Death Thrive. So, for Leotard, the Death…

• 00:36:21

  But then just to come back to actually a second time. So here we see his attempt to engage with the question of death trial. Again. Well, his version of death trial. ...it's not the case that Eros has produced a whole system's compositor or master binder. And that death trial has on the other hand destroyed a system…

• 00:45:33

  All right, well, I'll just leave it there. And then we can just...