That ex-boyfriend was Nick Land, who adumbrated, in a series of strange texts that blend the style of horror fiction with high theory, a view that became known as accelerationism

The post of his quoted earlier, about maintaining fidelity to the post-punk event, illustrates why you have to have some patience with Fisher, and also why you’ll be glad you did. First, there’s the lucid analysis: “Punk and post-punk, however, were profoundly suspicious of the Dionysian triumvirate of leisure, pleasure and intoxication, so that the required attitude was one of vigilant hyperrationalism.” (Where hippies smoked weed and related, punks took speed and argued.) Then there’s the surprising but suggestive connection: “The stance such a perception demanded—and this was a culture that was deliberately and unashamedly demanding—was one of ‘proletarian discipline’ rather than slack indulgence, its Puritanism recalling the egalitarian social ambitions of the original Puritans.” Then there’s the understated compassion, the trait that most clearly distinguishes him from Land and yet can’t be neatly separated from Fisher’s silly hobbyhorses: “Go into a roomful of teenagers and look at their self-scarred arms, the antidepressants that sedate them, the quiet desperation in their eyes. They literally do not know what it is they are missing. What they don’t have is what post-punk provided . . . A way out . . . and a reason to get out. . .”

And then there’s the paragraph so vertiginously hopeful that it makes you catch your breath

throwing around as you do so words as notoriously hard to define, as imbricated with the subjective, as family and desire

I can’t think of a better description for the quality that is everywhere in Fisher than “impersonal care.” He talks about his own problems, his own life, in a distanced, Ballardian way, and he avoids the risk of sentimentality perhaps too carefully. But he cares. He cares about books, he cares about records, he cares about friends, he cares about students, he cares about ideas, he cares about the world. He cannot write indifferently. Even his repeated efforts to wrest something useful from Nick Land are an example of care: he couldn’t throw an old mentor in the wastebasket. Elizabeth Bruenig, in a beautiful tribute to Fisher, writes that his interest in even the worst of pop culture was an act of “intellectual solidarity” with regular people, although I’d add that this was not a strategy that he thought through consciously. Fisher simply cared about everything. He is the only person who has ever made me want to read Deleuze; he is also the only person who has ever made me want to watch The Hunger Games.