The Weird and the Eerie

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Woodard, Benjamin Graham (2017). "The Weird and the Eerie". Textual Practice. 31 (6): 1181–1183. doi: 10.1080/0950236X.2017.1358704. S2CID 149095699. This theme – the limits of what can be known, the limits of what can be felt, the limits of what can be done – is central to Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie. This is markedly different from other approaches to horror, which, however critical they may seem, often regard the horror genre as having an essentially therapeutic function, enabling us to purge, cope with, or work through our collective fears and anxieties. This therapeutic view of horror often becomes polarized between reactionary readings (a horror story that promotes the establishing or re-establishing of norms) or progressive readings (a horror story that promotes otherness, difference, and transgression of norms). And yet, in the final analysis, it is also hard to escape the sense that there is a certain kind of solipsism to the horror genre, that it is we human beings that remain at the center of it all, who have either constructed boundaries and bunkers and have once again staved off another threat to our collective identity, or who have devised clever ways of creating hybrids, fusions, and monstrous couplings with the other, thereby extending humanity’s long dreamed-of share of immortality.

In the late 2000s, Fisher re-purposed the term " capitalist realism" to describe "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it". [21] En otras palabras, la intención de Fisher de catar lo raro y lo espeluznante convence más que el modo irregular en que la ejecuta. The scenes involving the sentient computer Hal, which maintains the systems on the Discovery One spacecraft, pose questions about agency on a smaller scale. Hal does not have a body, even if it has an organ — a red light-sensor — and a voice that is preternaturally calm. It certainly has agency, however, and the nature and scope of that agency — what drives Hal to rebel against the Discovery’s crew —becomes the crucial mystery in this section of the film. In the scenes where we see Bowman slowly, remorselessly dismantle Hal, and we hear Hal begin to audibly mentally deteriorate, we are con- fronted with the eerie disjunction between consciousness and the material hardware that makes consciousness possible.)

Fisher, Mark (22 November 2013). "Exiting the Vampire Castle". Archived from the original on 4 February 2018. Love — particularly love between parents and children — is a major theme of the film. The love between Cooper and his daughter, Murph, is what ultimately allows Brand’s Plan A to work — this connection between the two of them is what enables Cooper, when he is in the Tesseract, to send Murph the data she needs to solve the equation on which the plan depends. Although the love between the two is the central affective thread in the film, it is tragically thwarted. The two are only re-united on Murph’s deathbed. Because of the effects of relativity, Cooper looks much the same as he did when he left earth; Murph is by now an elderly woman, her life over, and Cooper has missed most of it. a b c d e f " Mark Fisher's K-punk blogs were required reading for a generation" by Simon Reynolds, The Guardian, 18 January 2017 Sin embargo, ni el ímpetu que opaca la exposición interpretativa, ni la exposición que camufla el misterio de las ficciones interpretadas, logran estandarizar el interés del autor (y por lo tanto, ubicar las ficciones abordadas en un mismo nivel de relevancia temática), o difuminar las tentativas de identificar a la fuerza lo raro y lo espeluznante en algunas de ellas. De todos los ensayos, me quedo con los tres últimos textos de la segunda parte, referida a lo espeluznante:

A contracorriente de lo que pudiera esperarse, los ensayos no explican ni analizan la causa o las características de la neblina. Nombran la situación en la que se produce (los escenarios ficticios de novelas, canciones y películas en los cuales trasunta o aparece lo raro, lo que no concuerda, o lo que no debería ser o estar, y lo espeluznante, lo desconocido, lo que está detrás de lo que vemos, lo que se esconde, lo que está ahí y que aún no se conoce); diseccionan sucesos y personajes al vuelo, vinculan temas y nudos con ideas de pensadores clásicos (en especial, con las ideas de Freud y Lacan), van hilvanando posibles itinerarios, guías impresionistas de qué o cuales podrían ser los puntos de una futura teoría, de un futuro abordaje libre de dudas, pero en el momento menos esperado, cuando ya algún trayecto ha empezado a cuajar, se acaban, son concluidos. Fisher los remata, los frena, los supende (con gracia o sin ella). Los corta ya sea con un broche épico, con alguna frase semi profética, o también, y no pocas veces, con un lánguido y anodino párrafo gris.

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Fisher, Mark (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Zero Books. ISBN 978-1-84694-317-1. Seaton, Lola (20 January 2021). "The ghosts of Mark Fisher". New Statesman . Retrieved 22 January 2021. During a scene onboard Endurance earlier in the film, Amelia Brand (John’s daughter) makes a case for love as a force from a “higher dimension”: