THE MAD MARXISM OF MARK FISHER

For a radical mental health policy

Abstract

Mad Marxism” seeks to combine the registers of lived experience, activism and the Argentinean conjuncture in the interpretation of Mark Fisher's thought. I make a reading of the English cultural critic reviewing his contributions for a critical theory of discomforts and an anti-capitalist praxis in mental health. In the first two sections I reconstruct certain aspects of Fisher's personal and generational reception in Argentina. Then I outline the conceptual rudiments of a philosophical investigation of “anxious depression” from K-punk. Fourth, I analyze the hypotheses of the politics of the symptomatic and the “class of the deranged,” attending to the ambivalent shift from collective self-consciousness to individual self-diagnosis. Fifth, I examine the economies of discomfort by virtue of problematizing the psychic normativity inherent in capitalist domination. And finally, I trace a brief counterpoint between Fisher and a “new right” intellectual on the crisis psychic.