Hauntology Quotes

“those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them forever”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Baudrillard observes somewhere that computers don’t really remember because they lack the ability to forget”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be embarrassing and sentimental”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Everything comes back as an advertising campaign. It isn’t just that the alternatives are written over, or out, it is that they return as their own simulacra”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“The past cannot be forgotten, the present cannot be remembered”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“There is today in the world a dominant discourse […] This dominating discourse often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work. The incantation repeats and ritualizes itself, it holds forth and holds to formulas, like any animistic magic. To the rhythm of a cadenced march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism!”
― Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

“The disarticulation of class from race, gender and sexuality has in fact been central to the success of the neoliberal project”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Why is it always raining here? Or is that just the sound of the television, tuned to a dead channel?”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Do we really have more substance than the ghosts we endlessly applaud?”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“The message of the English landscape is one of embrace - is one of humankind's ability to find our individual narratives among the pathways and allow those narratives to coexist harmoniously. My ghosts and your ghosts each take up zero space while coexisting in the same location; my myths and your myths have equal footing and, in fact, combine to form new, better, stronger myths.”
― Justin Hopper, Weird Walk: Number One: Beltane 2019

“What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate ... [T]he disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.”
― Mark Fisher