Mark Fisher - Anti-Vital (edited and remastered for listenability) (2)

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…

• 00:06:26

  Because, as you know, if you're familiar with Thousand Plateaus, the account of fascism, which then really is more about narcissism, actually, specifically. Via Virilio is about... It's of seeing narcissism as fundamentally a desire for death, a desire for kind of total immolation, which is going to be problematic…

• 00:13:39

  A crust, skin, shell, whatever. The shell is the basis of interiority. It's only because there's a hard shell that it's possible that there's an interiority, possible for there to be an interiority, possible for there to be something inside. But that means that there's a kind of... a kind of... a kind of... a kind…

• 00:19:17

  I think the other one is really problematic. The other one, in a way, you know, you can go back to that, I think, a lot of the problems of the 60s counterculture, which in many ways we can see, I think we can see a relation between Nick Land's work and that 60s counterculture in lots of ways, and a lot of the tension…

• 00:25:41

  That's what I say. So I think elements now of the Will, which is, you know, the Chopin, Harry and Will, which is characterised by its, you know, its insatiability, its, you know, its kind of, its blind fixation. It's those two things together, I think, which is key with the Chopin, Harry and Will, which can be seen…

• 00:32:17

  You know, whatever we think about that, I think what, I think the question he's posing, though, is, well, I think there's a number of things which are significant about that claim, one of which is, you know, to totally denaturalize the working class. You know, and this is something he draws out very interestingly…

• 00:38:52

  You can't just see them as a deviation from some normal functioning of things. You know, what is it that defines what that normal is? And in which case, the hysteria would be a failure or an adequacy. The hysteria is also, isn't this one of the great lessons of Freud that, you know, there are logics to conditions…

• 00:45:22

  And that's why it's so difficult. And that's one of the reasons it's so difficult to struggle against capitalism because we don't have the same resources of libidinal engineering at our disposal, at least on the face of it. All right, well, I'll just leave it there.