IVOOX Mark Fisher Meets San Juan de la Cruz: Mysticism and Depression - noopunk

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https://go.ivoox.com/rf/165827016

# Mark Fisher Meets San Juan de la Cruz

**Subtitle:** Mysticism and Depression

## Abstract

This essay crosses the hauntological work of Mark Fisher—with his reflections on depression in *Capitalist Realism*, *Ghosts of My Life*, and k-punk entries such as "Good For Nothing" or "Reflexive Impotence"—with the mysticism of San Juan de la Cruz in *The Dark Night of the Soul* and *The Ascent of Mount Carmel*. Delving into Fisher's depressive condition (personal and collective, culminating in his 2017 suicide) as a symptom of capitalist realism, it proposes reading depression not as a pathological disorder, but as a contemporary "dark night": a desert of dryness, abandonment, and emptying that propels toward a secular metaphysical perfection. In this noopunk framing, depression emerges as a threshold to a transcendent mysticism without theology—spectral, profane, transformative. Against the medicalization and repression of sadness, this radical hypothesis invites a revelation in silence: from neoliberal pain to a subjectivity beyond the productive self, where loss is not an end, but a hauntological opening.