Ab-Joy
Against posthumous joy
The essay introduces ab-joy only after diagnosing the reception of CCRU and K-Punk as a mythology of obituaries, anatomical theatres, and standardized 1990s nostalgia (To Wish Impossible Things, p. 1). Monacelli and Filippi admit their own attraction to this “frigid simulacrum”, but call its frictionless posthumous joy a repetition sustained by the very conformism it imagines itself to reject (To Wish Impossible Things, p. 2).
This rejected joy is important because ab-joy does not mean pleasure in CCRU commemoration; it names Fisher's retention of futurist desire after that pleasure has been recognized as a deadened commonplace (To Wish Impossible Things, pp. 2–4). The essay's “Deep Futurism” names the earlier wager that capitalist acceleration might still be steered toward emancipatory ends, a position that appears heretical only after the cultural counter-revolution has closed that horizon (To Wish Impossible Things, p. 3).
Desperate vitality after defeat
Ab-joy is Enrico Monacelli and Massimo Filippi's name for the political-affective structure they find in Mark Fisher: the preservation of emancipatory desire inside an exact recognition of cultural defeat. Its emblem is the first Terminator. For the authors, the cyborg once condensed a world open to technological upheaval and improbable historical change; Fisher retains its desperate vitality even after the franchise and the surrounding culture have become exhausted repetitions (To Wish Impossible Things, p. 3).
The prefix marks a withdrawal that is not simple privation. Ab-joy persists at a distance from available enjoyment: it neither celebrates the present nor converts failure into cultivated melancholy. Fisher's later rejection of the Terminator franchise acknowledges that novelty has been defanged, while his continuing attachment to the original image keeps open a demand for what the present cannot supply. In this sense ab-joy belongs beside capitalist realism as its affective counterpressure rather than its cheerful opposite (To Wish Impossible Things, pp. 3–4).
Nostalgia feeling and nostalgia mode
Monacelli and Filippi distinguish Fisher's nostalgia feeling from Nick Land's nostalgia mode. The former continues producing visions of a future that might yet be secured even at the height of despair. The latter remains fixed on a runaway capital already lost to a stagnant post-history. Both emerge from hyperstition and the wreck of CCRU futurism, but only Fisher's relation to that wreck is called ab-joyous (To Wish Impossible Things, p. 4).
This distinction prevents ab-joy from becoming a generic name for nostalgia. Fisher is said to understand that a lost cultural moment cannot simply be recovered and perhaps never existed as memory reconstructs it. Yet his criticism of contemporary screens, dreams and spectres continues to dissect the present as the return of broken desire. The pain is diagnostically useful because it makes collective sadness and neurosis available to transformation rather than embalming them as style (To Wish Impossible Things, pp. 4–5).
The essay's closing instance is Fisher's insistence that revolution poses logistical rather than ethical problems. Ab-joy does not furnish a program, but it preserves the transition from whether transformation should happen to how and when it can be made to happen (To Wish Impossible Things, p. 5).
The medium of intervention
The authors describe K-Punk posts as quick, compact interventions designed to strike a present still in formation, which makes their fragility and contingency part of their political force (To Wish Impossible Things, p. 5). Their defense of preservation is consequently narrow: anthologization saves precise diagnoses of disavowed fascism, unmappable exploitation, and non-cognitive labor, but does not cancel the danger of converting intervention into cemetery culture (To Wish Impossible Things, p. 5).
CONTRADICTION: The essay values the preservation of Fisher's blog interventions in book form while also arguing that anthologization can neutralize writings designed to be fragile, contingent and lethal in the present. Ab-joy survives through an archive that may convert intervention into commemoration (To Wish Impossible Things, p. 5).