Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

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But it is a completely different song than the other one that sounds slapped together in a few takes without a thought for the meaning. Uma analogia talvez ilustre o que quero dizer: imaginemos que Fisher é um biólogo, preocupado em comunicar aos espectadores o modo de vida dos animais que ele estuda. Fisher’s writing may resonate with those who came of age in the thick of capitalist realism, and who, unlike Fisher’s generation, have no memory of social democracy, precisely because it theorises a loss they can’t remember or measure, but which they’ve nevertheless inherited. What makes Ghosts stand out from Fisher’s more well-known Capitalist Realism is that here, instead of engaging head-on with political theory, he trains his volatile intellect mainly on popular music, as well as film and television (as he also does in his superb posthumous collection k-punk). So, not a song about a poor girl, but a song of hope and how you can rise up no matter how far down you started.

She never referred to a single other ghost story, and didn’t suffer fools gladly, but when she relayed that story you could tell that she believed every single word of it. Born in Leicester in 1968, Fisher grew up in the East Midlands town of Loughborough with working-class conservative parents – his father an engineer, his mother a cleaner. To Fisher, our century is the speed comedown after the giddy neuronal hyper-shifts within 1990s dance music, of which he was an ecstatic participant.You get the sense the publishers were trying to hide the true nature of the text in an attempt to nab some sales from those thinking it might be another C. In 2000 David Sylvian re-recorded "Ghosts" using the original Japan backing track and included it on his compilation albums Everything and Nothing (2000) and A Victim of Stars 1982–2012 (2012). A more accurate description would have been something like Writings on Electronic Music, Some Movies and Television Shows, with a short Intro on Hauntology. And yet, taken simply as a set of cultural coordinates, the contents of Ghosts of My Life seem remarkably comforting and familiar rather than energising, a veritable playlist of fortysomething faves.

is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action. The irony, given the breadth of Fisher’s appeal, is that alienation is clearly a mainstream condition. Writing in Smash Hits, Tim de Lisle described the single as "arguably the best thing they've ever done – slow, spare and mesmerising". There is a good account of it in Sir Shane Leslie’s 1956 book 'Ghosts' where he interviewed three of the priests involved in trying to remove the poltergeist. Sylvian has said that "Ghosts" was the first track that indicated the new direction of his compositions after the Japan period.

Some of his social theorising was good but I think he frequently does sound like an old man railing against what the youth like in spite of his opening thesis stating he was sure it was about that. R. Even the main concept of hauntology is only obliquely referenced in most of the articles, if it is at all.