100 Contextless Mark Fisher Quotes

‘What Ballard, Lacan and Burroughs have in common is the perception that human sexuality is essentially pornographic. For all three, human sexuality is irreducible to biological excitation; strip away the hallucinatory and the fantasmatic, and sexuality disappears with it. […] it is easier for an animal to enter the Symbolic Order than it is for a human to unlearn the Symbolic and attain animality […] when an orangutan was presented with pornography, it ceased to show any sexual interest in its fellow apes and spent all day masturbating.’

‘Perhaps all his [Mark E. Smith’s] writing was, from the start, an attempt to find a way out of that paradox which all working-class aspirants face — the impossibility of working-class achievement. Stay where you are, speak the language of your fathers, and you remain nothing; move up, learn to speak in the master language, and you have become a something, but only by erasing your origins — isn’t the achievement precisely that erasure?’

‘What we call the world is a local consensus hallucination, a shared dream.’

‘What Kant — and those who follow him in condemning porn because it “objectifies” — fails to recognise is that our deepest desire is not to possess an other but to be objectified by them, to be used by them in/as their fantasy. This is one sense of the famous Lacanian formula that “desire is…