Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Painting
First Advisor
Dana DeGuilio
Second Advisor
Yasi Alipour
Third Advisor
Meena Hasan
Abstract
Post-Desire comes from my personal take on and continuation of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire (2016)[1]. There, Fisher imagines an alternative to the capitalist consumption machine, one where desire is redirected back towards ourselves rather than to profit-driven, accelerationist motives. Fisher had a vision of a future both through and beyond the chains of capitalism. He pointed out in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism that “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”[2] This perspective is realistic—we are in the midst of a crisis of material reality and of imagination—but it is also optimistic because it highlights that even if we can’t conceive of it yet, there is a way to reclaim desire, and therefore, reclaim ourselves.
It is very easy to feel like we are heading into oblivion, and that the oblivion is approaching rapidly. While I personally relate to this feeling, I am also deeply invested in the future—my future and the futures of those around me. I’m also invested in desire, a feeling that I have a profound attachment to and sympathy for. I hope to reclaim my future and my desire, but I believe that in order to do that, I need to be honest about the conditions I’m living inside. This honesty is not defeatist—it’s the prerequisite to the continued embrace of the human, with all of its fleshy, wet, messy, gross, warm, sexy, curious, excited, and beautiful components. Because these things are not sacred, and they are vulnerable to being exploited by external pressure. While the pressure demands us to direct our desires towards sinister ends, restrict our imagination, and narrow future possibilities, I find it imperative that exploration can persist, and that I can talk about the oblivion and the human simultaneously.
In between the flesh and messiness is where lies desire—an impulse that might be in between everything human. Therefore, I wanted to borrow the same sense of a call to action that Fisher carried in Post-Capitalist Desire where he reaches towards a new kind of imagination, expansive future possibilities, and questions. However, I want to reorient his perspective toward personal and sexual desire as it relates to my artistic practice. The desire I am focusing on is a new kind: one that has seen capitalism but can live beyond it: Post-Desire. It’s at once an era, a future, and a command. It understands that it has been manipulated, twisted, sometimes disfigured, but refuses to give up and succumb completely. If desire is something uniquely living, warm, and vibrant, post-desire can define where or how that exists in a world that profits from, exploits, and deliberately confuses it.
The title also orders you to post desire. Posting as in publishing online or making an announcement or taking up a position and therefore, acknowledging that maybe now desire can’t exist outside of a public perspective. When I dwell on the idea of posting desire as it functions in my own life, I think about the ways that I might post myself. Whether that be on the internet or walking down the street, much of my relationship to desire can rest with the ways that I exude desire and allow myself to be greeted with it. Where do I exist within that dynamic?
[1] Mark Fisher. Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures (London, UK: Repeater Books, 2020)
[2] Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009) p. 2.
Though Fisher opens with this line, he attributes it to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. For Jameson's original idea, see "Future City," New Left Review, no. 21, May–June 2003, p. 76.
Recommended Citation
Luckovich, Lucy E., "Post Desire" (2026). Masters Theses. 1600.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1600
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