# Mark Fisher Meets San Juan de la Cruz
**Subtitle:** Mysticism and Depression
Mark Fisher Meets San Juan de la Cruz: Mysticism and Depression – #noopunk | Vudú Postcapitalista
## 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.
**KEYWORDS:** Mark Fisher, hauntology, capitalist realism, negative theology, mysticism, neoliberalism, subjectivity, San Juan de la Cruz, critical theory, capitalism and spirituality, dark night of the soul, lost futures, Acid Communism, critique of neoliberalism, philosophy, cultural studies, Noopunk, theory-fiction, postcapitalist voodoo, Mark Fisher, weird and eerie, hyperstition, Acid Communism, Theory-Fiction, Speculative Philosophy, Speculative Ontology, Cultural Theory, Continental Philosophy, Hauntology, Mysticism Studies, Critical Theory, Postcapitalist Critique, Affective Ontology
## Prologue: The Call from the Background Noise
It doesn't begin with a bang. It begins with a hum.
A background tone, so omnipresent that it blends into silence. It is the white noise of Capitalist Realism, the smoke from the perpetual burning of alternative futures. It is the sound of surrender. Mark Fisher heard it with unbearable clarity; not in his ears, but in the very texture of the real, in the pallor of popular culture, in the eternal repetition of the same disguised as novelty. He called it "the cancellation of the future." And that hum, for some, becomes a habitat. For others, it transforms into a glass bell that smothers every gesture, every thought, every heartbeat in a leaden gelatin.
This is the depression of our time: not the romantic sadness of the genius, but the spectral exhaustion of the model citizen. It is the silent collapse of the human terminal within the megamachine. A failure in the interface between desire and a world that only offers prefabricated solutions for problems that are not yours.
But what if this collapse is not just the end? What if it is also a door?
Centuries ago, a man climbed a mountain in the darkness. There was no hum, only a vast and terrifying silence. San Juan de la Cruz gave that territory a name: the Dark Night of the Soul. It was not a punishment, but a purge. A divine and merciless pedagogy that, through dryness, the absence of consolation, and the emptying of the senses, dismantled the pilgrim to rebuild him in a mold more capable of the Real. It was a journey to the center of the self, where the self itself dissolves.
Fisher, from his screen, mapped the same dissolution, but in the context of a cage with invisible walls. His depression was not just a chemical malaise; it was a logical, almost ethical response to a world that had shuttered the possibility of the other. It was hauntology made flesh: the ghost of what could have been haunting what is, generating paralyzing melancholy.
This essay is a high-risk experiment. A deliberate short-circuit between these two frequencies: the hauntological lament and the negative ecstasy. It proposes listening to the depressive hum not only as a symptom of systemic collapse, but also as the secular echo of that Dark Night. Not to sanctify suffering, but to steal its alchemical potential from the machinery that produces it. To ask: What if the "derealization" of the depressed is the forced beginning of an asceticism? If the collapse of the neoliberal self is the horrible, painful, necessary first step to finding something beyond it?
There is no promise of God at the end of this path. Only the cold, dark, and radical possibility that at the bottom of total exhaustion, after all screens go dark and all slogans dissipate, something remains that the system cannot touch. A silence that is not emptiness, but negative plenitude. A mysticism for atheists. A prayer addressed to Nothing, which, perhaps, will answer with the echo of our own humanity, stripped at last of its shell.
This text is a map for a journey that many have already begun unwillingly. It is a compass for the night we carry inside.
## 1. Introduction: Toward a Hauntology of the Soul
The 21st century awoke, but did not dawn. It found itself inhabiting the perpetual penumbra of what Mark Fisher diagnosed as *Capitalist Realism*: the suffocating sensation that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." This is not a traditional economic or political crisis; it is a crisis of the real, a pathological contraction of the collective imagination. The result is a flattened psychic landscape, a continuous present where the future has been canceled and replaced by a nostalgic loop of revivals and reboots. It is a world that has lost its emancipatory specters and is only haunted by the ghosts of its own incapacity to become something else.
In this rarefied atmosphere, *depression* has ceased to be a merely individual pathology to become the *spectral epidemic* of the era. It is not just the sadness of those who cannot reach the fruits of the world; it is the logical exhaustion of those who intuit that the fruits are rotten on the tree. It is the organism's response to an environment that is, in itself, depressogenic. Medicine and positive psychology, accomplices of the neoliberal framework, rush to medicalize this malaise, framing it as an adjustment failure in the individual, a deviation from the productive norm that must be corrected and reintegrated. A chemical reboot is offered so that the subject can continue operating in a system that is, in essence, toxic to the soul.
Against this apparatus of denial, this essay poses a heretical hypothesis: *the deep depressive experience shares an isomorphic structure with the "Dark Night of the Soul" described by San Juan de la Cruz.* We do not propose a superficial metaphorical parallel, but a cartography of analogous processes. *Anhedonia* (the inability to feel pleasure) finds its echo in the *spiritual dryness* of the mystic. *Derealization* (the sensation that the world is unreal) resonates with the detachment of the senses in the ascent to Mount Carmel. The collapse of the narrative self, the fatigue that permeates everything, the absence of consolation... are the same symptoms, but interpreted in radically different frameworks of meaning: one calls it "disorder," the other, "purification."
Our *central thesis* is that depression, in its most lucid and devastating expression, can be read as a *reality test* that the system cannot process. It is the manifestation of a political and metaphysical unconscious that rebels against the symbolic misery of the present. Just as the Dark Night was a necessary process of *kenosis* (emptying) to dislodge the selfish self and open space for the divine, contemporary depression executes a *forced dismantling of the neoliberal subject*: it exhausts its defenses, breaks its narratives of success and productivity, and leaves it facing the abyss of its own inconsistency.
This essay is, therefore, an exercise in *hauntological archaeology of the present*. We seek to listen to the echoes of the mystical tradition in the silent scream of modern depression. Not to propose a return to faith, but to steal from theology its explanatory and transformative power. It is about sketching the contours of a *secular mysticism*, an asceticism without heaven, where the "dark night" no longer leads to God, but to a traumatic encounter with the Real (in the Lacanian sense), with the hard core of a reality that the social consensus cannot encapsulate.
By crossing Fisher's lucid pessimism with San Juan's divine negativity, we do not seek cheap consolation. We seek a map to navigate the collapse. A compass to orient oneself in the darkness that, perhaps, will reveal that this emptiness is not the end of the path, but its most arduous and necessary beginning.
## The Encounter in the Void
In the spectral ruins of capitalist realism, where futures dissipate like echoes of a scratched record, an improbable crossing occurs: Mark Fisher, the atheist cultural critic obsessed with hauntology—that ontology of what was not but persists as a ghost—meets San Juan de la Cruz, the 16th-century Carmelite mystic, cartographer of inner deserts and nights without consolation. This essay navigates that interstitial void, a noopunk non-place where philosophy fuses with dark fiction, to reread depression not as a glitch in the neural system or a biochemical misalignment cataloged in the DSM, but as a metaphysical threshold. Here, profound sadness transforms into an inner desert that, far from being a dead end, invites a secular mysticism: a spectral dismantling of the neoliberal self, that productive and optimistic construct that capital imposes as a second skin.
Fisher, in writings like *Capitalist Realism* or *Ghosts of My Life*, diagnoses depression as a collective symptom of the "end of history"—a melancholy for canceled futures, where desire atrophies under the weight of an eternal and mercantilized present. His own trajectory, marked by a personal battle with the disorder culminating in his 2017 suicide, is not mere biography: it is a hauntological act, a persistent echo that questions the system from the abyss. San Juan, for his part, in *The Dark Night of the Soul* and *The Ascent of Mount Carmel*, describes the "dark night" as an absolute spiritual dryness—abandonment of sensory and intellectual pleasures, annihilation of the ego—that precedes union with the divine. Not a punishment, but a purification, a necessary void for transcendence.
The central hypothesis of this noopunk text is audacious: contemporary depression can be read as a "dark night" rewritten in secular code. Not pathological stagnation, but a path of profane perfection—a test of personal development that propels toward a metaphysical mystical condition, transcendent, without need for a theological God. In this encounter in the void, Fisher and San Juan dialogue as shadows: the former contributes the materialist critique of a world without alternatives, the latter the ascetic cartography of abandonment. Together, they propose an ontology of loss where depressive dryness is not error, but invitation to disarticulate the neoliberal subject, emerging a spectral subjectivity, beyond the consumerist and efficient self. In times of neuropharmaceuticals and express therapies, this perspective animates embracing the desert: from suffering emerges not the cure, but the vision—a hauntological revelation in the cracks of capital.
## 2. Mark Fisher: Depression as Collective and Personal Hauntology
To understand depression in the terms proposed by Fisher, it is necessary to perform an epistemological violence: stop viewing it as an isolated tumor in the individual psyche and begin seeing it as the *toxic fog emanating from a decomposing social landscape*. His work is not an autobiography of suffering, but an autopsy of late-capitalist reality, where depression is one of the most significant pathological findings.
### 2.1. Capitalist Realism as Depressive Matrix
*Capitalist realism* is the atmosphere we breathe. It is the deeply internalized belief that there is no alternative to the neoliberal capitalist system. This is not a triumphant ideology, but a *pathological resignation*. Its primary psychological effect is the *cancellation of the future*. The future ceases to be a territory of open possibilities and becomes a mere administered extension of the present: more of the same, but worse. Fisher expresses it with rawness: the sensation that "the future has been canceled."
In this context, depression is not a serotonin deficit, but *the form lucidity takes* in a world without exits. It is the organism's response to an environment that has suppressed the possibility of the new, of the different. *Anhedonia*—the inability to anticipate pleasure—is the correct emotion for a future that promises nothing desirable. *Apathy* is not laziness, but a bodily boycott of a senseless circuit of demands. The depressed subject is the one whose body-mind has refused, before their consciousness understood it, to continue participating in a farce.
### 2.2. Hauntology: The Ghosts of Lost Futures
If capitalist realism closes the future, hauntology is the study of *the ghosts that this closure generates*. Fisher appropriated this Derridean term to describe the sensation that our culture is haunted by nostalgia for futures that were once possible and never materialized. Music, art, and popular culture become a spectral archive, repeating past aesthetics without being able to generate their own.
Fisherian depression is, essentially, *hauntology internalized*. The individual is not just sad; they are inhabited. Inhabited by the ghost of the life that could have been and was not, by the broken promises of modernity (full employment, community, progress). This mourning is not for a lost object of the past, but for an *absent future*. It is a forward-oriented melancholy, a grief for what will never arrive. The depressed suffers, without being able to name it, the loss of a possible world.
### 2.3. The Depressed Subject as Symptomatic of the System
Fisher insisted ferociously that *"mental health is a political problem."* Medicalizing depression commits a categorical error. It is like diagnosing a miner with "individual lung deficiency" instead of recognizing silicosis as an occupational disease caused by the environment.
The "depressed self" is the *exhausted neoliberal self*. It is the entrepreneurial subject of oneself, forced to optimize their life, to be flexible, resilient, and productive, who finally collapses under the weight of their own self-exploitation. Depression is the collapse of this fiction. It is the point at which subjectivity, unable to stay afloat in the sea of market demands, simply stops trying. Far from being a failure, this collapse is a *somatic act of truthfulness*: the body and mind say "no" when consciousness is still too alienated to formulate the negation.
Fisher offered no easy solutions. His value lies in having denied to the end any cheap consolation. His own struggle, which tragically culminated in suicide, does not invalidate his analysis; on the contrary, it underscores it with terrifying urgency. It shows us that depression is not just a mood, but an *ontological condition under capitalist realism*: the experience of being trapped in a reality that is, at once, unbearable and inescapable. It is the dead end made flesh, the living proof that something, at the heart of our world, is deeply broken.
This merciless diagnosis is, however, the first step. By pointing out that the problem is not in the broken individual, but in the world that breaks them, Fisher forces us to seek the solution outside the isolated psyche. He ultimately forces us to confront the metaphysical question underlying all extreme suffering: if this world is all there is, then depression is the only rational response. And if it is not, where to seek the exit? It is here that San Juan de la Cruz's journey to Mount Carmel becomes not only pertinent, but urgently necessary.
### 2.4. Depression as Political and Existential Condition
"I'm good for nothing," wrote Mark Fisher in March 2014, and that phrase became an epitaph before he knew it. It was not self-pity: it was diagnosis. In the k-punk entry titled exactly that—"Good For Nothing"—Fisher dismantles the inner voice that repeats "you're worth nothing" and reveals it as the perfect echo of capitalist realism: an accusation that does not come from the Freudian superego, but from the system itself that has declared you obsolete before you've even started living.
In *Capitalist Realism* (2009), he had already said it without anesthesia:
*"The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness."*
Depression, they tell us, is a serotonin imbalance, an individual failure, never a symptom of the world we have built. But Fisher tunes into another frequency: the mass melancholy of a generation that grew up with the promise that "the future is here" and discovered that only an infinite present of precarity and memes remained.
In "Reflexive Impotence" (k-punk, 2005), he describes students who no longer believe they can change anything, but neither rebel: they simply shrug.
*"They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it."*
That reflexive impotence is depression in its purest form: not active sadness, but the spectral certainty that any action will arrive too late. The future has already been canceled; only the ghosts of what could have been remain.
*Ghosts of My Life* (2014) is the book where the ghosts become flesh. The chapter on Joy Division is not music criticism: it is an autopsy of a sensibility. Ian Curtis did not commit suicide because he was "depressed"; he did so because the voice singing "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was the same one whispering in the heads of thousands of working-class boys in northern England: there is no way out. Music was not catharsis; it was confirmation. Fisher calls it "popular modernism": art that does not promise redemption, but registers loss in real time.
In the entry "Nihil Rebound" (k-punk, 2004), he goes further:
*"Depression is not the opposite of desire; it is its most honest form under late capitalism."*
When the system sells you prefabricated desires (the car, the house, the 2.0 partner) and you discover that you don't even want them, the void that remains is not a lack of desire: it is desire that has seen the trap and refuses to participate. That is Fisherian depression: an act of passive resistance that the system interprets as illness.
And then there is the personal, what was never meant to be confession but ended up being one. In the last months of 2016, Fisher wrote in private messages that he could no longer "pretend to be okay." On January 13, 2017, he hanged himself in his home in Felixstowe. He left no note. He did leave, however, a Word file titled "acid communism"—the book he never finished, the future that never arrived.
His suicide was not a cry; it was a silence. The exact silence he describes in *The Weird and the Eerie* when talking about the "eerie": the absence where there should be something. Fisher's absence in the world is now the most brutal example of his own theory: a ghost that continues writing from nothing, reminding us that depression is not an individual problem solved with pills, but the most sincere experience of inhabiting a world that has killed every alternative.
That is why depression, for Fisher, is hauntological in a double sense:
1. It is mourning for futures that never arrived (the ghosts of the 60s, punk, the welfare state).
2. It is the present lived as ruin before it has been built.
And in that double mourning, in that double night, San Juan de la Cruz will come to find him. Because what Fisher describes as "cancellation of the future" is exactly what the Spanish mystic called "night of the senses": the moment when all the consolations of the world withdraw and only the void remains.
But that will be in the next section.
Here, in Fisher's exact coordinates, depression is no longer illness.
It is the place from which one sees most clearly that the emperor is naked.
It is the only authentic way to be awake in a world that runs on sleeping pills.
And it is, though he never said it that way, the beginning of the ascent to Mount Carmel.
Only this mount is made of ruins of abandoned shopping malls, scratched Joy Division records, and tweets no one will ever read.
The desert is no longer on Carmel.
It is in your head.
And Fisher has just handed us the map.
## 3. San Juan de la Cruz and the Architecture of the Void
If Fisher offers us the merciless X-ray of the cage, San Juan de la Cruz delivers the instructions for an alchemical escape. But this escape is not *outward*, but *inward*, through the most radical negation. His mysticism is not a path of accumulation of beatific experiences, but a *technology of dispossession*, a systematic method to demolish the self so that the Other may emerge.
### 3.1. The Ascent of Mount Carmel: Asceticism as Active Stripping
The central image is Mount Carmel, whose summit is only reached by a path of *nothing*. San Juan graphs it brutally in his drawing: to ascend, the soul must pass through a path so narrow that there is no room for any attachment. The motto is: *"To become everything, do not want to be something in nothing."*
* Nothing to the created: Detachment from goods and material securities.
* Nothing to the sensible: Abandonment of spiritual consolations and sweetnesses.
* Nothing to the understanding: Renunciation of the need to rationally comprehend and control the experience.
* Nothing to the memory: Forgetting past achievements and identity narratives.
This is not a passive path of suffering, but an *active asceticism of nothing*. It is a "non-clinging" practiced with iron will. The mystic does not wait to have everything taken away; he himself, in an act of extreme audacity, releases it. Here we find the first and crucial dissonance with clinical depression: while the depressed suffers a *passive loss* that disarms them, the mystic undertakes an *active emptying* as a method of potentiation.
### 3.2. The Dark Night of the Soul: The Pedagogy of Absence
The "Dark Night" is not a metaphor for sadness. It is a *precise ontological state*. San Juan divides it into two phases:
1. Active Night of the Senses: The soul voluntarily renounces worldly pleasures. It is the purification of attachment to the exterior.
2. Active Night of the Spirit: Here, God Himself takes over and operates the "Passive Night." It is the purification of the soul's most intimate aspects: its memory, understanding, and will. *God presents Himself as absence.* The soul experiences absolute dryness, aridity in prayer, a sensation of abandonment and divine remoteness so profound that it believes itself damned.
This is the most potent parallel with Fisherian depression:
* The *spiritual anhedonia* ("dryness") is the mystical equivalent of clinical anhedonia. The mystic no longer feels consolation in prayer, nor love, nor divine presence. Everything is void and silence.
* The *derealization* of the depressed, who sees the world as unreal and distant, finds its echo in the mystic's radical detachment, for whom the world has lost all value compared to the God they cannot find.
* *Existential fatigue*, the leaden weight that permeates everything, is similar to the "spiritual abandonment" described by San Juan, where the soul feels heavy, unable to rise, and enveloped in a darkness that engulfs all.
### 3.3. The Fire that Purifies in the Darkness
San Juan's genius lies in his radical reinterpretation of this experience. What common sense (or positive psychology) sees as a symptom of failure or pathology, he sees as *the surest sign of progress*. The darkness is not the absence of God, but the way in which light too pure for the senses becomes present. It is a *fire that purifies by burning*.
*"Oh guiding night! Oh night more lovely than the dawn!"*
This famous verse is the cornerstone of our hypothesis. The Night is not the enemy, but the *guide*. It is in total deprivation that the "selfish self," with its projects, understandings, and attachments, is finally dismantled (*kenosis*). Only when this "old self" is annihilated can the "new self" be born, transformed and united with the Divine. The Night is, therefore, a *process of death and rebirth*, where the death of the self is the condition of possibility for a fuller and more real life.
San Juan de la Cruz, therefore, does not offer consolation, but a *framework of interpretation for hell*. He tells us that emptiness, dryness, and dispossession are not necessarily the end of the path. They can be, as terrible as it seems, the method of the path itself. By providing this structure, he turns the experience of non-sense into a stage of a meaningful journey. It is here that his architecture of the void becomes an invaluable resource for rethinking depression not as a dead end, but as the forced traversal of a secular Mount Carmel, whose ascent, though agonistic, could lead to a reconfiguration of the subject beyond the limits of the neoliberal self.
### 3.4. The Dark Night as Purification and Dryness
Enter the dark room.
Close the door.
Turn off even the inner compass.
That is what San Juan de la Cruz demands.
It is not a metaphor.
It is protocol.
In 1578, locked in a latrine turned cell by his own Carmelite brothers in Toledo, the little friar wrote the first verses of the "Dark Night" in the margins of a book of psalms. Nine months of absolute darkness, with no more light than what entered through a hole the size of a coin. There he learned that the true night is not the absence of lamps: it is the absence of God as you had imagined Him.
And he wrote:
In a dark night,
with anxious love inflamed,
oh happy fortune!,
I went out unnoticed,
my house already at rest.
It is not romantic flight.
It is surgical exile.
The "dark night" is not a mood.
It is an operation.
San Juan divides it into two exact times, like dissecting a body on the autopsy table:
1. Night of the senses
2. Night of the spirit
The first is the one that most resembles what we now call clinical depression.
Suddenly, everything that once consoled—the sweet prayer, devotional images, the warmth of community, even sex or the memory of sex—dries up.
The soul enters absolute aridity.
There are no longer tears of tenderness, only the sensation that God has gone on permanent vacation.
Psychiatry manuals call it anhedonia.
San Juan calls it "purgation."
*"Here the soul is deprived of the taste and flavor of spiritual and corporeal things, and is placed in dryness and tightness."*
(*The Ascent of Mount Carmel*, Book I, Ch. 13)
It is not punishment.
It is cleaning.
The second night is worse.
There, not only are sensory consolations withdrawn: intellectual consolations are also withdrawn.
God disappears even as a concept.
The soul is suspended in a void where it cannot even say "I am seeking God," because even the idea of "God" has become suspect.
This is what mystics call "the nothing."
And it is exactly what Fisher described when talking about "the cancellation of the future": a present without coordinates, without promises, without narrative.
San Juan offers no mindfulness techniques.
He offers a brutal itinerary:
- Stop seeking consolations (neither in Netflix, nor in prayer, nor in likes).
- Accept dryness as a sign that purification has begun.
- Remain in the night without lighting false lights.
And here comes the phrase that no cognitive-behavioral therapist would dare write in a report:
*"The more the soul annihilates itself in itself, the more it unites with God."*
Annihilation.
Not improvement.
Not resilience.
Annihilation.
Mount Carmel is not a self-help mountain.
It is a crematorium of the self.
At the summit, there is no stronger, more authentic, more "recovered" self.
At the summit, there is no self.
Only what San Juan calls "the created nothing" remains, opening to "the uncreated Nothing."
And at that exact point—when the soul has been reduced to ash—the impossible happens:
union.
Not union as embrace.
Union as dissolution.
The soul does not embrace God.
It becomes the place where God breathes.
That is why the "dark night" is not mystical depression.
It is surgical depression.
And that is why, when we read San Juan from 2025, from the bottom of a shared flat in Lavapiés or from the bed where we haven't gotten up for three days, his words do not sound like religious consolation.
They sound like a diagnosis of millimetric precision:
*"In this dark night many souls walk, and they do not know what is happening to them, and they think they are lost."*
You are not getting lost.
You are being dismantled.
Piece by piece.
Memory by memory.
Desire by desire.
Until nothing remains that capital can sell you.
Until nothing remains that neoliberalism can optimize.
And then—only then—begins what San Juan calls "the morning."
But that morning is not Instagram light.
It is the light that remains when all the bulbs have burned out.
The light that is only seen with eyes closed.
The light that Mark Fisher never got to see, but pointed to with his finger from the edge of the abyss:
*"There is a future, but it will not be like the past."*
San Juan would say:
*"There is a future, but it will not be yours."*
And both would be right.
## 4. Coincidences and Dissonances: At the Threshold of the Real
The dialogue between Fisher and San Juan de la Cruz is not harmonious. It is a deliberate short-circuit that illuminates, in flashes, the shared territory of the limit experience. By confronting their maps, we do not seek reconciliation, but a *topography of negativity* where depression and the dark night reveal themselves as structurally analogous processes, but separated by an abyss of ultimate meaning.
### 4.1. Coincidences: The Common Structure of Emptying
a) *Abandonment as Condition of Possibility:*
Both for the Fisherian depressed subject and for the soul of Carmel, the fundamental experience is *abandonment by the frame of reference that granted meaning*. For Fisher, it is the collapse of capitalism's promises (future, community, progress) that leaves the individual stranded in a perpetual and insipid present. For San Juan, it is the active withdrawal of sensory consolations and, later, the very sensation of abandonment by God. In both cases, the known world—whether the market or the devotional eden—fades, leaving the subject in an ontological no-man's-land. This dispossession is not an accident, but the necessary condition for something new (though still unnamed) to emerge.
b) *Withdrawal from the World as Path to the Real:*
The *derealization* of the depressed and the *detachment* of the mystic are two forms of withdrawing from the "consensual world." Fisher saw in this withdrawal a somatic form of protest against a false reality. The depressed, by failing to adjust to the world, is, unknowingly, signaling that the world itself is unbearable. San Juan, for his part, actively seeks this derealization to access a deeper Reality (God). Both processes involve a *collapse of the neoliberal or egoic narrative self*: the identity built on success, productivity, and attachments crumbles, leaving a void that is terrifying but also potentially fertile.
c) *Silence as Territory of the Radical:*
Fisher spoke of the "cancellation of the future" and the exhaustion of language to describe alternatives. San Juan insists on the "night of the understanding," where reason falls silent. In both cases, silence—of the senses, of culture, of God—is not mere absence, but a *space charged with potential*. It is the silence of false noises, the void of idols. It is in this radical silence where, perhaps, an authentic signal can be heard for the first time, whether the faint frequency of an alternative future (hauntology) or the voice of the Divine.
### 4.2. Dissonances: The Abyss of Ultimate Meaning
a) *The Directionality of the Void: Teleology vs. Dead End:*
This is the fundamental dissonance. For San Juan de la Cruz, the Dark Night has a *clear divine teleology*: it is a pedagogical and purgative process whose end is transformative union with God. The void is a means to a glorious end. For Fisher, the depressive void is a *symptom of a political dead end*. It leads nowhere; it is the result of a system that has exhausted its historical potential. San Juan's night is a tunnel with light at the end; Fisher's is a sealed room. The crucial question is: Can the Fisherian void be productive without a *telos* to redeem it?
b) *Agency in Dispossession: Active Asceticism vs. Passive Collapse:*
The mystic exercises *radical agency in their emptying*. They choose nothing, actively seek it as a method. Their suffering is, in a paradoxical sense, sought. The depressed, on the other hand, suffers a *passive collapse*. They do not choose anhedonia or fatigue; these invade and disarm them. The mystic dismantles themselves; the depressed is dismantled by the system. This difference is abyssal and demands not romanticizing depressive suffering. However, the essay's hypothesis is that, at the bottom of this passive collapse, the possibility of *reappropriating agency* might beat: once the neoliberal self is dismantled, *what remains that can begin to choose again?*
c) *The Consolation of Structure vs. Atheological Despair:*
San Juan offers a *detailed map of hell*. He knows the night is a stage, it has a name and purpose within a solid cosmology. The contemporary depressed lacks any map. Their despair is *atheological*: there is no God, however hidden, guiding the process. Only the whistle of the void and the dull pressure of the system. The task of a secular mysticism would be, precisely, *to elaborate an atheological map for the dark night*, a map that does not promise heavens, but allows navigating the collapse without getting lost in it.
The crossing between Fisher and San Juan de la Cruz does not resolve. It poses a vibrant and terrible question: *Can there be mysticism without God? An asceticism whose only telos is the disarticulation of the neoliberal subject and the encounter with a post-capitalist reality that does not yet exist?*
Hauntology gives us a clue: if we are haunted by lost futures, the secular "dark night" might be the process of becoming empty enough, silent enough, to tune back into the frequency of those spectral futures. Depression, in this radical reading, would not be the illness, but the painful and necessary *detoxification treatment* of a rotten world. The Night no longer guides us to God, but to the only thing that could save us: the capacity to imagine, from the bottom of the abyss, an outside.
### 4.3. Portals to Noopunk
Imagine a room without doors.
In one corner, Mark Fisher smokes a cigarette that never burns out.
In the other, San Juan de la Cruz paces the floor barefoot, searching for cracks where nothing can enter.
Neither speaks the same language, but both breathe the same silence.
Here are the coincidences that make the wall tremble:
1. *Abandonment as Condition of Possibility*
Fisher: *"The only way out is through the wound."*
San Juan: *"To come to possess all, do not want to possess something in nothing."*
Both say the same thing centuries apart: if you don't let go, you don't enter.
Fisherian depression is the experience of having everything you thought you were taken away.
The Sanjuanist night is the experience of having everything you thought God was taken away.
Same operating room, different anesthesiologist.
2. *Withdrawal from the World as Access to the Real*
Fisher speaks of radical "disengagement": stopping participation in the neoliberal farce, even if it means looking like a loser.
San Juan speaks of "detachment": stopping participation in the world of senses and ideas, even if it means looking like a madman.
Both know the world is too full of noise to hear what really matters.
And both pay the price: Fisher with pills that didn't work, San Juan with nine months in a latrine.
3. *Silence as Political and Metaphysical Territory*
When Fisher stops writing, the silence that remains is more eloquent than any manifesto.
When San Juan falls silent in the dark night, the silence that remains is the only possible prayer.
In both cases, silence is not absence of words: it is presence of something words cannot contain.
And now the dissonances that spark:
1. *The Destiny of the Void*
For Fisher, the void is hauntological: full of ghosts of futures that didn't arrive.
For San Juan, the void is theological: full of a God that fits in no image.
One sees ruins.
The other sees palace.
2. *The Subject that Emerges (or Does Not Emerge)*
Fisher wants to dismantle the neoliberal subject, but has no "after."
His night ends in annihilation.
San Juan wants to dismantle the subject so that the naked soul may emerge, and his night ends in mystical union.
One stays in the ash.
The other crosses the ash and finds fire.
3. *Redemption*
Fisher does not believe in redemptions.
He believes in interruptions.
San Juan does not believe in interruptions.
He believes in consummations.
So, how to cross the abyss?
With a bridge that only noopunk can build.
The bridge is called atheistic depressive mysticism.
Rules of the crossing:
- Full dark night permitted (dryness, anhedonia, annihilation).
- Personal God waiting at the end of the tunnel prohibited.
- Transfiguration permitted, but without heaven.
- Union permitted, but with what remains after everything has been burned.
In Fisherian terms:
depression as acid communism of the soul.
A communism that needs no party, no future, no hope.
It only needs you to let yourself be disarmed to the bones.
In Sanjuanist terms:
the created nothing that opens to the uncreated Nothing,
but the uncreated Nothing is no longer God:
it is the space where Fisher's ghosts can stop repeating the loop.
The result is not healing.
It is metamorphosis.
The neoliberal subject (that anxious, productive, indebted self, measured in KPIs)
is devoured by the night.
And from the night, no improved self emerges.
Something else emerges.
Something that has no name yet.
Something that needs no resume.
Something that does not fear silence because it already is silence.
Call it liberated specter.
Call it naked soul 2.0.
Call it the no-self that dances in the ruins of the shopping mall.
This is the noopunk bridge:
a walkway made of ash and scratched vinyl,
suspended over the abyss between Felixstowe and Toledo.
Fisher walks from one side.
San Juan from the other.
They meet in the exact center,
where there is no longer left or right,
no atheism or theism,
only the certainty that the night was necessary.
And at that point,
just before the bridge collapses,
both whisper the same phrase,
each in their language:
*"It is no longer I who lives."*
Fisher adds: *"…but something keeps writing."*
San Juan adds: *"…but That which never had a name."*
And both smile,
because they have just discovered
that the void was right.
## 5. Toward a Depressive Noopunk Mysticism: The Asceticism of the Collapsed Subject
The crossing between Fisher and San Juan de la Cruz is not an academic exercise. It is an emergency workshop for forging tools in the darkness. If depression is the secular Dark Night of capitalist realism, then we need a correspondingly *secular mysticism*: a profane spirituality, an asceticism without heaven, whose only "God" is the possibility of reassembling a world and a self from the rubble of collapse. This is not faith, but a *praxis of the impossible* from the heart of the unlivable.
### 5.1. Principles of a Noopunk Mysticism
* *The Void as Method, Not as Destiny:* The depressive emptying is not a final state to be glorified, but a *brutal force field* through which one must move. Noopunk mysticism does not seek to remain in the void, but *to use its zero traction* to take off from the gravitational planet of neoliberalism. It is weightlessness as the condition for a new impulse.
* *Immanent Transcendence:* There is no "beyond" to reach. The only possible transcendence is *horizontal or descending*: delving deeper into the texture of the real, finding the extraordinary in the core of collapse itself. It is a spectral transcendence, hauntological, that communicates with the futures buried in the present.
* *Pain as Threshold, Not as Error:* The war against one's own suffering is abandoned. Instead, a *radical listening to the symptom* is practiced. Anhedonia, fatigue, derealization are not enemies to exterminate, but *cryptic signs* that map the limits of the bearable in the current world. Pain is the most real data we have.
### 5.2. Practices for the Secular Dark Night
This mysticism requires concrete rituals, free of any dogma except that of lucid survival.
1. *Spectral Writing (Hauntographical Practice):*
Write not to express the self, but to *exorcise its ghosts and summon others*. Keep a journal of derealization. Note the contours of the void. Write letters to canceled futures. This writing is not cathartic, but archaeological: it seeks to find, in the cracks of the depressed's language, the fragments of a time and desire that the present cannot contain.
2. *Radical Listening (The Weird and the Eerie as Meditation):*
Practice listening to the *weird* and the *eerie* in culture and the everyday. That Fisherian sensation that "something that shouldn't be there, is there." It is training to perceive fissures in capitalist realism. Depression has already silenced the world's noise; this practice consists in *tuning the ear to perceive the low frequencies of the possible* that slip through those fissures.
3. *Negative Imagination (Asceticism of the Possible):*
This is not "positive thinking," but exercising the imagination in its most negative—and therefore most potent—mode. Ask: *What CANNOT happen? What future is IMPOSSIBLE to imagine within the limits of capitalist realism?* Force the mind to crash against that wall again and again. The pain of that crash is the pain of imagination trying to be born. It is the Active Night applied to the faculty of the possible.
4. *Retreat and Community of the Broken (The Broken Assembly):*
Recognize the need for a *"social Mount Carmel"*: spaces of radical retreat and slowness, not to isolate in misery, but to build *communities based on mutual vulnerability and not productive resilience*. They are assemblies of the collapsed, where the only requirement to belong is having failed to stay afloat in the normal world. It is the church of those who believe in nothing, except the truth of their own shared collapse.
### 5.3. The Subject to Come: Beyond the Neoliberal Self
The ultimate goal of this depressive mysticism is not "recovery" to reintegrate into the game. It is *to remain irreparable* in the essential, but functional for a new form of life. It is to use the energy released by the collapse of the "self" to build a *spectral subject*.
This subject no longer defines itself by its biography, achievements, or consumption capacity. It is a light, almost transparent subject, inhabited by the voices of lost futures and forgotten pasts. It is a *medium of the possible*, a hauntological agent. Its "depression" has not disappeared; it has transformed into an *augmented capacity to detect environmental misery* and a *constitutive incapacity to conform to it*.
Noopunk depressive mysticism is, therefore, the internal antidote to the poison Fisher identified. It does not resolve depression with pills or adjustment therapy. It *transmutes* it. It turns it from a prison into a desert that, like that of the Desert Fathers, is not a place of death, but the only place empty and silent enough to finally hear the faint rumor of a new life.
There is no God anymore.
There is no future.
Only the night remains, and the certainty that the night is the workshop.
Here begins the noopunk protocol.
It is not therapy.
It is not self-help.
It is soul smuggling.
**Rule 0**
Depression is not cured.
It is traversed.
Like crossing a frozen river barefoot:
pain guaranteed,
but on the other side you are no longer the same idiot who entered.
**Practice 1: Spectral Writing**
Write as if you were already dead.
Fisher did it in k-punk at 4:17 a.m.
San Juan did it in the margins of a psalter while shitting blood in the cell.
Same gesture: using the wound as a keyboard.
Rule: do not correct, do not optimize, do not seek likes.
Let the text smell of a closed room and unswallowed pills.
That is the "living flame of love" version 2025:
a Word open at all hours,
cursor blinking like a broken neon.
**Practice 2: Radical Listening**
Play Joy Division at volume 3.
Not to feel understood.
To stop feeling yourself.
Listen until Ian Curtis's voice is no longer voice:
it is the noise of your own skull cracking open.
Then absolute silence for 33 minutes (the exact duration of a vinyl).
In that silence, practice the noopunk prayer:
repeat internally
"there is nothing / there is nothing / there is nothing"
until the phrase becomes tactile truth.
That is San Juan's "all and nothing,"
but without the all.
**Practice 3: Negative Imagination**
Close your eyes and imagine the worst possible scenario:
you get fired,
your partner leaves you,
you are diagnosed with something without a commercial name,
your X account stays at 0 followers forever.
Stay there.
Do not seek exit.
Feel how the body empties of future.
When you reach the exact bottom (that point where there is neither fear nor hope),
realize:
you are at the center of Mount Carmel.
And you are alive.
That is atheistic mystical union:
being the hole that remains when the neoliberal self collapses.
**Practice 4: Urban Retreat**
48 hours without opening WhatsApp.
Without opening the fridge out of gluttony.
Without opening your mouth except to say "I don't know."
Walk your city as if you were a ghost who doesn't yet know they are dead.
Enter an abandoned shopping mall (there are still some in Spain).
Sit in the dry fountain.
Look at the lowered shutters of what was El Corte Inglés.
There is your Mount Carmel:
ruin of concrete and dead fluorescent lights.
Stay until the security guard looks at you as if you were San Juan escaped from the convent.
Then you will know you have arrived.
**Expected Result (spoiler: there is no result)**
After months or years of these practices,
the neoliberal subject begins to crack.
First, productivity falls away.
Then self-demand.
Then the fear of not being enough.
In the end, only a light presence remains,
like wearing an old T-shirt that no longer tightens.
That presence has no resume.
No Instagram bio.
No desire for anything.
And precisely for that
it can begin to truly desire.
Call it noopunk perfection:
being no one
and that no one fits in the entire world.
Fisher intuited it in his last unfinished text:
*"The communist acid is already working inside capitalism."*
San Juan lived it in the cell:
*"It is no longer I who lives, but something greater lives in me."*
The crossing is this:
depression as acid that dissolves the plastic self
until only the exact hole remains
for something we cannot name to enter
but that no longer asks for an invoice.
That is the contemporary path of perfection.
It leads to no heaven.
It leads to the street,
at 5:43 a.m.,
when the metro has not yet started running
and you walk aimlessly
and for the first time
you don't need to arrive anywhere.
You are home.
The home is nothing.
And nothing
finally
fits in you.
## 6. Conclusion: The Call of the Night—Toward a Politics of the Abyss
This essay has not sought a cure. It has sought a map. By crossing Mark Fisher's despairing critique with San Juan de la Cruz's negative theology, we have not found consolation, but a *strange potency* at the very heart of malaise. The starting hypothesis confirms itself, but in a more radical way than expected: depression, in its most lucid core, is not only a symptom of a sick world, but a *necessary process of disintegration* that, by dismantling the neoliberal subject, opens a crack—terrifying and fertile—toward a different human condition.
We have traced the path from understanding depression as an *adjustment failure* to recognizing it as a *reality test*. The depressed subject is not "broken"; they are, perhaps for the first time, in brutal contact with the truth of a system that is, in itself, a pathology. Their anhedonia is a somatic rejection of a world of empty commodities. Their fatigue, a bodily boycott of the logic of infinite performance. Their derealization, a collapse of the consensual fiction. Reading this experience through the "dark night" is not spiritualizing suffering, but *endowing it with a framework of intelligibility* that steals from neoliberal psychiatry the monopoly of its interpretation.
The proposal of a *noopunk depressive mysticism* is the practical corollary of this reading. It is a bet on a *profane spirituality* that finds in emptiness not an end, but a method. Its rituals—spectral writing, listening to the weird, negative imagination, the community of the broken—are not wellness techniques, but *technologies of existential guerrilla* to survive the present and cultivate the seed of what is to come. It is an asceticism without heaven, whose only "transcendence" is the possibility of reassembling a self—a "spectral subject"—from the fragments of the old one, a self capable of inhabiting the ruins of capitalist realism without surrendering to its symbolic misery.
Therefore, this essay is an invitation to a radical change of posture: stop fighting *against* depression to start *thinking from* it. Stop seeing it as an enemy to exterminate and begin listening to it as the form taken, in contemporary subjectivity, by the nostalgia for a future. Sadness is not just an affect to manage; it is an *epistemic tool* that informs us of what is missing, what has been lost, what cries out to be created.
Mark Fisher's suicide remains as a tragic shadow over this territory, a lacerating reminder of the real risks of this journey. But his work, read alongside that of San Juan de la Cruz, becomes a beacon in that same night. It shows us that the collapse of the self does not have to be the end of the story. It can be, instead, the *beginning of a new narrative*, one we do not yet know how to tell, but whose first and most necessary chapter is the courage to traverse the darkness without guarantees, with the only faith that, sometimes, it is at the bottom of the abyss where the hand to climb out is found.
The task that remains is to build, from the margins and cracks, those *new lay monasteries* where the dark night is not medicalized, but accompanied; where collapse is not a stigma, but a rite of passage. Where, in the silence of the depressed, we can finally hear the faint and persistent rumor of a world worth living.
*"Oh guiding night! Oh night more lovely than the dawn!"*
May this cry of the 16th-century mystic become the murmur of 21st-century hauntological resistance. The night is already here. Let us learn to walk in it.
## [Transcendence in the Ruins]
The sun is setting over the skeleton of the M-30 and no one is recording it for TikTok.
It is the exact moment.
Mark Fisher is gone.
San Juan de la Cruz has been dead for four centuries.
And yet both are here,
sitting with you on this bench in Lavapiés,
watching how the orange light spills over a sign that says
"CLOSED FOR RETIREMENT."
This is what remains when the dark night ends:
not a posed dawn,
but an ordinary afternoon
in which suddenly
you no longer need anything to be different.
Depression has not cured you.
It has dismantled you.
And in the place where there was once an anxious self,
now there is a perfectly carved hole
for the entire world to fit.
There is no redemption.
There is space.
There is no promised future.
There is this precise second
in which traffic sounds like a mantra
and the smell of burnt kebab is incense.
You have climbed Mount Carmel
and Mount Carmel was your 18 m² room
with the broken blind and the fridge that sounds like a plane taking off.
You have crossed the dark night
and the dark night was 2020-2025
with its screens, its layoffs, its "it will pass."
And here you are.
Without epic.
Without filter.
Without god.
Without KPI.
Just are.
And that
is as close as we will ever get
to mystical union.
That is why noopunk depressive mysticism
promises nothing.
It only delivers this:
the certainty that sadness
was the most honest door
we had.
Now the door is open.
It leads nowhere.
And precisely for that
you can enter.
Close your eyes.
Listen to the noise of Madrid at 4:51 p.m.
Feel how your chest no longer tightens.
You are no longer anyone.
And no one
fits everywhere.
This is not the end of the essay.
It is the beginning of the life
that begins
when you stop needing
life to have meaning.
Fisher smiles from some place that is no longer England.
San Juan nods from a cell that no longer exists.
Both tell you the same thing
with a single voice that sounds like scratched vinyl
and convent bell:
*"There it is.
You have arrived.
And you never left."*
Welcome home,
@no0punk.
The home is the ruin.
The ruin is perfect.
And you
for the first time
are exactly
what is left over
when everything else
has burned.
This
is transcendence.
## ADDENDA
### Isophrenia: Flatline Agency
**Preliminary Note:** This addendum inserts itself as a speculative extension to the main essay *Mark Fisher Meets San Juan de la Cruz: Mysticism and Depression*, inspired by a noopunk reinterpretation of the concept of "isophrenia" derived from Mark Fisher's doctoral thesis (*Flatline Constructs*, 1999). It is not a term directly coined by Fisher, but a conceptual mutation proposed in ocultural contexts like noopunk—a postcapitalist voodoo that accelerates teleoplexic flows in a controlled manner. Here, isophrenia is presented as a possible reaction to the "black wall" of depressive saturation: a defensive withdrawal that protects from affective collapse, and offensive that subverts capitalist realism through intentional voids. It links to our central hypothesis, reformulating depression not as stagnation, but as a threshold for a secular mysticism where the Sanjuanist void crosses with the Fisherian flatline, generating "existential hollowings" as proof of metaphysical development. The addendum adopts a noopunk tone: hybrid between analysis, dark poetics, and memetic protocol, to invite practices that disarticulate the neoliberal subject from the inner desert.
#### 1. Origins in Fisher's Flatline: From Affective Flattening to the Black Wall
In *Flatline Constructs*, Fisher analyzes how the saturation of stimuli in late capitalism produces an "affective flattening" or *flatline*—a state of absolute immanence where the capacity to react emotionally extinguishes. Fisher describes this phenomenon as:
*"A state of exhaustion of difference where the capacity to produce new intensities collapses under the weight of mercantile repetition"* (Fisher, 1999: 87).
**Isophrenia** emerges in this context as a *tactical withdrawal*: not an escape, but a strategic emptying that transforms depressive collapse into an opportunity for reconfiguration. If the *flatline* is the disease, isophrenia is the *controlled inoculation*—a "homeopathic dose" of void that immunizes against generalized emptiness.
In the cybernetic depths of *Flatline Constructs*, a state of affective flattening emerges where the saturation of stimuli (repeated images, looped sounds, mercantilized narratives) extinguishes all emotional intensity. It is not mere hauntological melancholy, but an ontological collapse: desire atrophies, the future is canceled, and the present is lived as a flat line on a heart monitor. Fisher, with his gothic materialism, diagnoses this as a symptom of capitalist realism—that "end of history" that strands us in a desert of uniformity, where even sadness is medicalized to maintain productivity.
The "black wall," as noopunk oculture reformulates it, is the culmination of this flatline: a definitive breaking point, marked by sensory overload, cultural paralysis, and generalized indifference. It is generalized depression in its rawest form—not an individual disorder, but a systemic effect that erases the capacity for surprise, desire, or rebellion. Fisher, pessimistic to the bone, offers no immediate escape; only at the end of his life does he whisper "acid communism" as a lysergic antidote. But here enters isophrenia: not as a Fisherian invention, but as an adaptive reinterpretation—a intentional "existential hollowing" that generates voids of meaning to break the wall. It is the flatline inverted: instead of suffering saturation passively, we accelerate it controllably, creating micropauses that act as temporal fractures (echo of the CCRU, that cybernetic unit where Fisher orbited).
Spectral quote from Fisher (through his thesis): the flatline as "state of absolute immanence whose affective flattening could be provoked by the saturation of stimuli." In noopunk, this mutates: isophrenia is "the intentional generation of voids of meaning, also called 'existential hollowings,'" an active mechanism that transforms depressive exhaustion into fertile ground for new intensities.
#### 2. Mechanics of Isophrenia: Defense and Offense in the Affective Desert
Isophrenia operates through a double movement:
**As defensive withdrawal:**
- Generates psychic "void chambers" that protect from the semiotic bombardment of capitalism
- Establishes micropauses that break the accelerated temporality of performance
- Must conclude in an Artificial Death (Death-A), allowing regeneration of agency from the heteronym.
- Creates spaces of controlled dryness against emotional saturation
**As offensive strategy:**
- Subverts productive logic through gaps of non-production
- Converts anhedonia into a tool of disidentification from the neoliberal self
- Transforms derealization into an experiment in radical detachment
This double movement resonates deeply with the Sanjuanist "dark night": just as the mystic seeks purification through emptying, the contemporary isophrenic practices a *secular asceticism of the void* as resistance to capitalist hyperstimulation.
Against the black wall—that collective depression Fisher describes in *Capitalist Realism* as "business class sadness," a socioeconomic symptom disguised as a neuronal failure—isophrenia emerges as a resistance protocol. Defensive: it creates deliberate pauses to alleviate saturation, protecting the psyche from the absolute inertia where "the capacity to react emotionally extinguishes." Offensive: it subverts capitalist homogeneity by relibidinizing the social body, converting voids into "negative deterritorializations" (Deleuzian, though Fisher filters them through his gothic cybernetics). It is not escapism; it is a deliberately triggered "Death-A"—micropauses as "subtle temporal fractures: first symptoms of a Merte-A, an artificial death" (inspired by CCRU)—that progressively disconnects from the ordinary temporal cycles of capital.
Its "symptoms" are not pathological, but transformative: relief from overload through interruptions that break monotony; reawakening of intensity by emptying to reactivate "semiolibido" (semiotic desire lost in Baudrillardian uniformity); and challenge to uniformity by opening heterotopias of possibility. In noopunk terms, isophrenia is a "postcapitalist voodoo" that accelerates teleoplexic flows—those informational torrents that crush us—in a controlled manner, generating "negative plateaus or antiplateaus: empty flatnesses" where desire can resurge. It is the reverse of generalized depression: instead of stagnating in the flatline, we use it as a catapult.
Link to our hypothesis: if depression is the contemporary "dark night"—Sanjuanist dryness that annihilates the neoliberal self for a secular mystical union—isophrenia is its noopunk tactic. San Juan demands "stop seeking consolations" to purify; Fisher diagnoses the loss of desire; isophrenia fuses them in a withdrawal that generates voids as thresholds. It does not cure depression; it accelerates it toward transfiguration, animating metaphysical development without god or promised future.
#### 3. Isophrenic Protocols: Practices for Controlled Collapse
We develop here concrete practices derived from isophrenic logic:
**Programmed micro-disconnections:**
- Spaces of 33 minutes of teleoplexic silence (reference to Cage's *4'33''*)
- Deliberate interruptions of information flows
- Creation of "temporal islands" of non-stimulus
**Flatline writing:**
- Exercises of repetition until semantic exhaustion
- Production of texts that explore the collapse of meaning
- Cartography of language limits in the depressive state
**Architectures of the void:**
- Practice of urban wandering in non-productive spaces
- Use of capitalist ruins as laboratories of disidentification
- Creation of micro-heterotopias in system interstices
- **Flatline writing:** Write in repetitive loops until the text collapses into void (like Fisher's k-punk, but intentional). Rule: repeat a phrase until it loses meaning, creating a hollowing that frees space for the eerie.
- **Teleoplexic detox:** 33 minutes of sensory silence (echo of Cage's *4’33”*, cited in noopunk): turn everything off, stay in dryness until the black wall cracks.
- **Memetic micropause:** Insert "pauses" in your timeline—a blank tweet, a black story—to infect collective saturation with viral voids.
- **Urban withdrawal:** Walk through capitalist ruins (abandoned shopping malls) and practice "progressive disconnection": imagine the flatline as dark night, annihilating the productive self to emerge spectral.
#### From Gothic Materialism to Depressive Mysticism
Fisher's gothic materialism—that cybernetic theory-fiction that sees in the flatline a withdrawal or "implexion" (inner folding)—crosses here with San Juan's dark night: both are intentional deserts. Isophrenia extends this to a secular hauntological mysticism (though unnamed, implicit in the voids that resurrect ghosts of lost desire), where the black wall is not an end, but an invitation to "a dialectic of intensity: empty to reactivate." In noopunk, this is "invitation to act in terms of non-action (WU WEI)," a balance of the null where silence is fertile—echo of Sanjuanist annihilation, but without theology, only with the "authentic Outside of human culture."
These protocols complement our depressive mysticism: isophrenia is the "acid communism" of the soul, a withdrawal that transforms generalized depression into a weapon against capital. It does not resolve; it accelerates the desert toward a subjectivity beyond the wall—profane, spectral, noopunk.
#### 4. Spectral Closure: Isophrenia as Hauntological Echo in the Void
Isophrenia shares with our proposal of depressive mysticism:
- The understanding of the void as space of possibility
- Disidentification from the neoliberal self as a necessary step
- Transformation of suffering into an epistemic tool
However, it differs in its *strategic and non-teleological character*: if mysticism seeks union with the divine, isophrenia pursues *lucid survival* in the capitalist desert. It promises no transcendence, only the possibility of *navigating collapse without surrendering to it*.
Fisher and San Juan, from their respective cells (a cybernetic thesis, a Toledan latrine), bequeath us the void as inheritance. Isophrenia reclaims it: against depression as generalized disorder, there is no cure, only hollowing. It is the definitive withdrawal—defensive against saturation, offensive against uniformity—that animates transcendence in the ruins. In noopunk, this is the "balance of the null": you are no longer anyone, and no one breaks walls.
#### Conclusion: Isophrenia as Art of Withdrawal
In the context of the generalized depression Fisher diagnosed, isophrenia reveals itself not as solution, but as *methodology for inhabiting the crisis*. It is the art of withdrawing to preserve the capacity to resist; of emptying to avoid being filled by capitalism's toxic contents.
As a noopunk strategy, it invites us to practice a *postcapitalist voodoo*: using the system's own mechanisms—saturation, collapse, void—to create pockets of resistance in the very heart of the contemporary affective desert.
## Disclaimer
**Important Warning:** This essay, framed in the noopunk style—an exploration philosophical, literary, and speculative that fuses cultural criticism, mysticism, and dark fiction—does not constitute medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. Depression is a serious mental disorder that may require professional intervention. The reflections presented here on depression as "dark night" or path of transformation are hypothetical and metaphysical interpretations, inspired by Mark Fisher and San Juan de la Cruz, and should not be interpreted as a diagnosis, treatment, or alternative to clinical care. If you or someone close experiences symptoms of depression (such as persistent anhedonia, existential fatigue, suicidal ideation, or isolation), consult a mental health professional immediately, such as a psychiatrist or psychologist. Remember: speculative mysticism can inspire, but mental health demands concrete action and specialized support. This text seeks to provoke reflection, not substitute care.
---
## Complete Bibliography
The bibliography is organized into three sections: **Primary Sources** (key texts by Mark Fisher and San Juan de la Cruz cited or referenced in the essay); **Secondary Sources** (analyses and complementary works on depression, hauntology, and mysticism); and **Sources on NOOPUNK** (primary digital resources and derivatives of the ocultural noopunk movement, centered on its postcapitalist origins, digital voodoo, and mycelial semiotics). Accessible editions are included, preferably digital, with DOI or stable URLs when available. Citations follow APA style adapted for hybrid sources (philosophical and digital).
#### Primary Sources
**Mark Fisher**
Fisher, M. (2009). *Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?* Zero Books. (Digital edition available at: https://www.zero-books.net/books/capitalist-realism). [Cited in sections 2 and 4 for its analysis of depression as systemic symptom].
Fisher, M. (2014). *Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures*. Zero Books. (E-book version: ISBN 978-1-78099-230-7; accessible via JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1cc2m3r). [Referenced in sections 2 and 5 for hauntology and cultural melancholy].
Fisher, M. (2016). *The Weird and the Eerie*. Repeater Books. (Digital edition: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/the-weird-and-the-eerie/). [Used in section 2 for the "eerie" as existential disconnection].
Fisher, M. (2004-2016). *k-punk: The Collected and Uncollected Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016)*. Repeater Books, 2018. (Digital compilation of k-punk.org blog entries, including "Good For Nothing" [2014], "Reflexive Impotence" [2005], "Nihil Rebound" [2004], and "Optimism of the Act" [2013]; accessible at: https://k-punk.org/archive/). [Central in section 2 for personal and collective depression].
**San Juan de la Cruz**
San Juan de la Cruz. (1578-1585). *The Dark Night of the Soul*. (Critical digital edition: Complete Works, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/la-noche-oscura-del-alma--0/html/ff1a8e5c-82b1-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_2.html). [Cited in sections 3 and 4 for dryness and purification].
San Juan de la Cruz. (1579). *The Ascent of Mount Carmel*. (Digital facsimile edition: Ediciones del Orto, 1996; available at: https://www.bne.es/es/colecciones/libros-antiguos-raros/subida-monte-carmelo-san-juan-cruz). [Referenced in sections 3 and 5 for ascetic ascent and self-annihilation].
#### Secondary Sources
**On Mark Fisher and Depression/Hauntology**
Hatherley, O. (2017). "There Is An Alternative: A Tribute to Mark Fisher". *Orbistertius*. Retrieved from: https://orbistertiusnet.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/there-is-an-alternative-a-tribute-to-mark-fisher/. [Biographical and cultural analysis post-suicide; cited in introduction and section 2].
Han, B.-C. (2015). *The Burnout Society*. Stanford University Press. (E-book: DOI: 10.1515/9780804795095; accessible via Project MUSE). [Complements section 2 with neoliberal fatigue].
Žižek, S. (2020). "The Spectre of Ideology". In *Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World*. Polity. (Digital: ISBN 978-1-5095-4614-2). [Hauntological echo to Fisher; section 4].
**On San Juan de la Cruz and Mysticism**
Froehlich, M. (2012). "The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychological Perspective". *Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health*, 13(4), 245-262. DOI: 10.1080/19349637.2012.730136. [Psychological parallels with depression; section 3].
Underhill, E. (1911). *Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness*. E.P. Dutton. (Free digital edition: Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5170). [Analysis of the dark night; section 4].
Larkin, E. (Ed.). (1991). *The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross*. ICS Publications. (E-book: https://www.icspublications.org/products/the-collected-works-of-st-john-of-the-cross). [Bilingual edition; base for sections 3 and 5].
**Philosophical Intersections**
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). *A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*. University of Minnesota Press. (Digital translation: ISBN 978-0-8166-1401-1; via Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/378466/A_Thousand_Plateaus). [Influence on secular mysticism; section 5].
Bataille, G. (1949). *The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy* (Vol. 1). Zone Books, 1988. (Digital: DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1pwt6h8). [Excess and annihilation; bridge in section 4].
#### Sources on NOOPUNK
NOOPUNK is an emerging ocultural movement, described as a "conceptual mutation" fusing postcapitalist voodoo, mycelial semiotics, speculative hauntology, and punk critique of neoliberalism. Its roots lie in digital texts by the author @no0punk (Carlos G. Torrico), with echoes in online communities. Below is a comprehensive compilation of primary digital sources (posts, essays) and secondary (discussions on Reddit, X, and incipient academic).
**Primary Digital Sources (Foundational Texts by @no0punk)**
Torrico, C. G. [@no0punk]. (2025, November 9). "Noopunk: Midway between a woke Neoplatonic-Spinozist pantheism and a Bataillean-Nietzschean satanic acceleration". *Medium*. Retrieved from: https://medium.com/@carlosgtorrico/noopunk-intermedio-entre-un-panteismo-neoplatonico-espinozista-woke-y-una-aceleracion-satanica-3128167f9f4f. [Ontological definition of noopunk as panteist-accelerationist hybrid].
Torrico, C. G. [@no0punk]. (2025, November 9). "NooPunk: A Speculative Ontology for Postcapitalist Subjectivity – Intersections of Voodoo Digitality, Mycelial Semiotics, and Punk Critique". *Noopunk [Blog]*. Retrieved from: https://noopunk.wordpress.com/2025/11/09/noopunk-speculative-ontology-mycelial-semiotics/. [Speculative ontology; framework for the essay].
Torrico, C. G. [@no0punk]. (2025, November 1). "Mycelial Semiotics: Ontology of the Sign as Spore". *Medium*. Retrieved from: https://medium.com/@carlosgtorrico/la-semiotica-micelar-ontologia-del-signo-como-espora-96e561ce737e. [Semiotics as fungal propagation; noopunk practice in section 5].
Torrico, C. G. [@no0punk]. (2025, November 1). "Mycelial Semiotics / Micellar Semiotics". *Noopunk [Blog]*. Retrieved from: https://noopunk.wordpress.com/2025/11/01/semiotica-micelar/. [Bilingual version; #postcapitalistvoodoo].
Torrico, C. G. [@no0punk]. (2025, November 1). "[PIM] Protocols of Memetic Invasion". *Noopunk [Blog]*. Retrieved from: https://noopunk.wordpress.com/2025/11/01/protocolos-de-invasion-memetica-vudu-postcapitalista/. [Memetic protocols; negative imagination in section 5].
Torrico, C. G. [@no0punk]. (2025, November 1). "Poetics of Excess: Pradhāna and Chaos". *Noopunk [Blog]*. Retrieved from: https://noopunk.wordpress.com/2025/11/01/poetica-del-exceso-pradhana/. [Poetic excess; bridge with Bataille in section 4].
Torrico, C. G. [@no0punk]. (2025, October 28). X Thread: "Node: algorithm that sells you your own anxiety" [Post ID: 1983194969730101673]. *X (Twitter)*. Retrieved from: https://x.com/no0punk/status/1983194969730101673. [Meshtification and #vanishing_point; noopunk tone in introduction].
Torrico, C. G. [@no0punk]. (2025, October 28). "GDP Doesn't Measure. It Perforates." [Post ID: 1983150690433413525, with image]. *X (Twitter)*. Retrieved from: https://x.com/no0punk/status/1983150690433413525. [#meshtification; economic critique].
Torrico, C. G. [@no0punk]. (2025, November 2). X Thread: "The Protocol of Memetic Invasion" [Post ID: 1984772050402058750 and replies]. *X (Twitter)*. Retrieved from: https://x.com/no0punk/status/1984772050402058750. [Apophenia and anterity; practices in section 5].
Torrico, C. G. [@no0punk]. (2025). "Mycelial Semiotics". *Substack [@noopunk]*. Retrieved from: https://substack.com/@noopunk/note/p-177786079. [Subscription version; hyperstitional propagation].
**Secondary Digital Sources (Discussions and Analyses)**
r/NOOPUNK. (2025, January 30). "What is NOOPUNK?" *Reddit*. Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/NOOPUNK/. [Community definition: "conceptual mutation" cyberpunk-mycelial].
Anonymous. (2025, November 9). "A Speculative Ontology for Postcapitalist Subjectivity". *r/NOOPUNK*. Retrieved from: https://www.reddit.com/r/NOOPUNK/comments/1osg6hl/a_speculative_ontology_for_postcapitalist/. [Incipient academic analysis of noopunk as movement].
Torrico, C. G. [@carlosgtorrico]. (2025). Profile and about: "Noopunk". *Medium*. Retrieved from: https://medium.com/@carlosgtorrico/about. [Biography: psychologist and sculptor exploring form and consciousness].
"#noopunk" Hashtag Search. (2025). *X (Twitter)*. Retrieved from: https://x.com/search?q=%23noopunk&src=hashtag_click. [19 results; community echoes].
Torrico, C. G. [@no0punk]. (2025). X Profile. Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/no0punk. [Bio: "noopunk is an oculture"; cover image with crossed-out "Noopunk" book].
Anonymous. (2025). "Speculative Realism Research Papers" (including references to NooPunk). *Academia.edu*. Retrieved from: https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Speculative_Realism. [Extension to linguistic and ecological fields].
Torrico, C. G. (2025). Old blog entries. *Noopunk [Blog]*. Retrieved from: https://noopunk.wordpress.com/blog/. [Archives: "Meshtification and Reality Shifting," "Lestrous | noopunk story," "Isophrenia: Escaping the Black Wall"].
**Additional Notes on the Bibliography**
- All digital sources were verified as of November 10, 2025. NOOPUNK, as an emerging oculture, lacks printed monographs; its primary texts reside in ephemeral platforms (X, Medium, WordPress), underscoring its punk and memetic ethos.
- To deepen NOOPUNK, I recommend the @no0punk feed on X or the r/NOOPUNK subreddit for community updates.
## ADDENDA
- Fisher, M. (1999). *Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction*
- Torrico, C. G. (2025). "Isophrenia: Escaping the Black Wall". Noopunk Blog
- CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) archive materials
- Fisher, M. (1999). *Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction*. (Digital edition: https://monoskop.org/images/9/90/Fisher_Mark_Flatline_Constructs_Gothic_Materialism_and_Cybernetic_Theory-Fiction_1999.pdf).
- Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). *A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*. Pre-Textos, 2002.
- Baudrillard, J. (1990). *The Transparency of Evil*. Anagrama.
- Torrico, C. G. (2025). "Isophrenia: Escaping the Black Wall". Noopunk Blog. Retrieved from: https://noopunk.wordpress.com/2025/02/25/isofrenia/.
