Tag Archives: leftism

When Mark Fisher, the late cultural theorist whose “K-punk blogs were required reading for a generation,” wrote his (in)famous 2013 essay, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” he was responding to the path contemporary leftism had been uncritically going down for years.¹⁾Simon Reynolds, “Mark Fisher’s K-punk blogs were required reading for a generation,” The Guardian, accessed 3/31/19, published 1/18/17; Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” in K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (London: Repeater Books, 2018): 737-745. Academically insulating itself from the world at large and maintaining an air of superiority, contemporary leftism was cultivating what Fisher saw as “an atmosphere of snarky resentment” coupled with “bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism,” traits born by ignoring class consciousness as such in favor of attacking specific individuals’ social status. Indeed, for Fisher, focus within the contemporary left shifted from broad-based class solidarity (with the recognition that individuals make mistakes and need not be excessively villainized for them) to rigid identitarianism where individual purity had to be maintained, and anyone not up to par must be purged.

While brilliant, Fisher’s analysis was instantly controversial as he shined light on a very unpalatable side of contemporary leftism which drained serious movements of their lifeforce: vampirism. Further, while being no less salient six years later, Fisher’s essay leaves some things unsaid with others still only implied. Thus, given the fact that we never really left, it is more important than ever to reexamine the rigid structure the left currently occupies: the Vampires’ Castle.

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