A Toast to the Damned Waiting for Tomorrow: Hauntology and Mourning for a Future that never Comes

Abstract

Drawing on Berardi (2011), and Hägglund (2008), Mark Fisher (2009; 2014;2021) posits two pillars upon which his thoughts on history and philosophy are built; the first, what is called a slow cancellation of the future, or in a general sense, how the XX century more than simply casting its shadows over the XXIst, it never really ended. For Fisher, this is due to an ongoing deflation of people’s expectations regarding what is yet to come and a cultural nostalgic turn. Here, nostalgia as Jameson proposed it should be seen more as an attachment to old techniques and formulas than to a psychological state. The second pillar reads Derrida’s hauntology as a failed morning which in Fisher’s work appears linked to the ghosts of a future that never took place. A future of possibilities dreamt during labor and civil rights movements but that ended up being crushed by neoliberal policies. Thus, hauntology and the cancellation of the future as seen in Fisher, and Berardi will be the tools through which this article will analyze Hideo Kojima’s 2019 game Death Stranding, as well as its homonymous novelization (2021) by Hitori Nojima.