The class, Postcapitalist Desire, for which you can easily find a syllabus online, was something of a workshop where Fisher was talking through the concepts that were going to go into his last book Acid Communism and it was going to meet for fifteen sessions but Fisher passed away after the fifth one. He took his own life in January of 2017. This fact, for me, hangs over the whole of the book: this brilliant man, who seemed to be an enthusiastic and gentle educator , talking about the possibility of a world that could be free, died before the sixth lecture could be held.
Read MoreBecause if we're all going to die then we might as well die in luxury SUVs with fuel economy measured in gallons per mile with the Pixar movie Cars playing in the back seat so the kids don't notice that they're breathing in poison.
Read MoreBut all of this is beside the point: the fact that we can pick out two dominant aesthetics in the visual media form of what is supposed to be a “literature of ideas” is a problem. It indicates, if anything, a lack of ideas. If our options are just a visual vocabulary iteration of the old Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate that no one but the people having it are interested in, we've got problems.
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