flocksy takes

Hauntology beyond the Pale. Searching for anarchism in Disco Elysium

Sat 24 January 2026

The kind of melancholia I'm talking about, by contrast, consists not in giving up on desire but in refusing to yield. It consists, that is to say, in a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call 'reality' - even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time… —Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life

How do you cope with a world that is already fraying at the edges, soon disintegrating wholly? How do you get by? What do you do? When I look around my neighbourhood or my workplace or - god forbid - the internet, I know that everyone is feeling the same thing. A certain tension as if something extraordinary is about to happen, like a long breath before a jump from a really high diving platform but who is to say what awaits us below?

Most people, I guess myself included, try to just not think about it for too long. They ignore and compartmentalise the certain doom awaiting us if we keep on our current trajectory, living in the here and now, enjoying the company of people we like, other people like us. Others seek refuge in religion, the manifest belief that something good awaits us at the other side. And yet others try to find reprieve in more political approaches - also belief systems but not quite religious - ideologies is what we call them. I used to be one of these people.

In recent memory, no other video game has captured that feeling of loss in the face of imminent if abstract doom quite like Disco Eylsium. But what made the game in the eyes of many so unique was that it did not shy away from framing the people of its unhinged world and how they live within it. Drugs, religion and political ideas are all on display, used as armour to shield the people from uncertainty. What's more, the player themselves has great freedom to partake in these activities as much as they want, including leading some of these to their fatal conclusions.

The player avatar of Disco Elysium is Harrier Du Bois - Harry, for short -, an amnesiac cop initially sent to the game's locale to investigate a murder of a hanged man but whose proclivity to meet his depression with alcohol has rendered him absolutely oblivious to himself and everything else. The game begins with Harry naked on the ground with no recollection of anything not even his name or face. A perfect narrative stand-in for the player to both make sense of this strange new world and provide the freedom to mold Harry into whatever copotype - in the game's parlance - they feel comfortable playing. From Honour Cop and Hobocop to Superstar and Sorry Cop the game not only provides interesting narrative choices but explicates these, often in humorous ways on the expense of Harry or the player. Although not explicitly copotypes Harry is also able to internalise the different ideologies held by the inhabitants of Martinaise. With the release of The Final Cut edition Harry is also able to not only accept these ideologies but perform "Political Vision Quests" so as to become a true believer of them.

When I was still an adolescent kid I was what Disco Elysium would call a Moralist - a believer in the status quo that saw a righteousness in the infinitesimal progress of mankind over time, willfully oblivious to the exploitation and harm my comfort required of others. In retrospect, it is fascinating that my parents instilled this pseudo-politics in me. I was born into the last breaths of real existing socialism to be a child in the ravages of neoliberal shock therapy, officially designed to bring us into the Liberal International Order (LIO) but practically just a ransacking of dilapidated infrastructure to feed the empty order books of our long lost fellow countrymen. My parents both learned a vocation when they were not even 20 to then work the same machines for decades, labourers in the most classical sense. My father in particular did manual labour for barely more than the minimum wage until his body could no longer perform and he became a nightwatchman earning exactly minimum wage. One would think that in such material conditions my parents would have had a more critical stance to the status quo. Yet in the last parliamentary election he voted for the neoliberal priests still preaching their antiquated sermons. I've never seen so much lack of class consciousness in my life.

The place in which Disco Elysium unfolds is the district of Martinaise in the city of Revachol. It is a rundown part of a city that has seen more conflict than good in quite a while. Many decades ago Revachol was the center of a proletarian revolution overthrowing the ruling monarchy. Although the communards tried to secure their power only a few years later a coalition of allied nations attacked the communists and overthrew them in turn. After that, the city of Revachol has been turned into a "Zone of Control" administered by the Coalition of Nations and their Moralist International (or MoralIntern in its official Orwellsian abbreviation), in turn a strange ourobouros of Liberal International institutions and state Religion.1

Martinaise, notably, was one of the regions hit hardest during the Coalition's attacks and thus saw multiple wars in few years. After the establishment of the MoralInterns rule Martinaise saw everything from neoliberal landgrabing, to ill-fated attempts at gentrifications, to general dilapidation of the still existing infrastructure and buildings. A stroll from one corner of the map to the other will show you layers upon layers of history that is reminiscent of many Eastern European cities in the early 2000s where the brushed metal and clean glass surfaces of Western progress have not yet eradicated and smoothed out all reminders of what has come before.

This historical setting sets the stage for a place locked in limbo. When Harry first steps out of the inn where he awoke from his alcohol induced stupor he is met with a giant traffic jam of countless lorries. The harbour gates have been shut close due to a strike of the Dockworkers' Union. Just south of the traffic jam the water lock across the canal has broken down and the repairs take several in-game days to get it fixed. Even the murder investigation is stalled as both Harry and his partner Kim Kitsuragi are unable to easily get the hanged man down. Everything in Martinaise seems as though suspended in time. From the snow and ice encrusting the beaches to the MoralIntern's flying warships in the sky, this world has no future only a continuation of the status quo and the memory of a complicated, fractured past.

This gives more room for the characters we can talk to in the world. If there is one thing critics are unanimous about this game it's that the writing of all the different non-player characters is simply amazing. Anyone who played this game can tell you of at least one or two characters that have stuck with them. While I have a special place in my heart for Easy Leo, it is with Neha, the Novelty Dicemaker, where the brilliance of Disco Elysium's world building and character writing shines through most noticeably. You will find Neha at the end of a sidequest investigating whether the Doomed Commercial Area in Martinaise is the victim of a supernatural curse. After traipsing through dark hallways and abandoned offices in search of proof for the curse you find out that she is merely working in a converted chimney of a decommissioned heating furnace and thus sometimes making inadvertant noises. The absurdity of this mundane resolution of this supernatural sidequest meets the precarious life of Neha, working alone a highly specialised craft while sitting uneasily next to a gigantic hole in the ground. But stepping into her workshop is so stark a contrast to all of this and the rest of the building, with beautiful foliage framing a huge window that bathes everything in light. Neha herself reflects this image with her kind way of talking, giving much needed contrast to the otherwise gloomy Martinaise.

When I was in high school some of my classmates explicitly styled themselves as neo-nazis. To this day it is impossible for me to grasp why someone would actively call themselves something that - in my mind - is one of the worst insults someone could thrust at me, reserved only for people who hate so much that they become evil itself. Yet, they were my friends back then. In fact, I am still convinced that they were some of the smartest guys in my school although that might just say more about my school than my friends. Their worldview - also instilled through their parents - has always been insane, though. One of them died shortly after we graduated, I never found out what happened to the others.

Beyond the people and the material condition of Martinaise Disco Elysium is also hiding a fascinating mystery about its world. While completely missable if the player is not veering from the critical path of the main story a key feature of the world is something called the Pale. An unknowable mass that encircles the planet, a non-place where the past accumulates relentlessly and people disintegrate after too much exposure. The Pale is real in the same sense a mountain is real but it is at the same time un-real, a manifest paradox in the world. The game would explain that the Pale is the ever expanding heat death of the universe localised on a planet that gave birth to intelligent life. Yet, even though the Pale upends the laws of physics it is still traversable with people moving through it to different states and places in the world.

What a metaphor! For how we - our societies, our cities, our communities, neighbourhoods, ourselves - are separated by a sheer impenetrable force (language! culture! knowledge! beliefs!), beautiful and dangerous. A metaphor for how it is possible only with the greatest of efforts to cross over to one another, make connections and build something lasting together. How some people go to great lengths for these connections, braving impossible obstacles. How other people would exploit the brave ones for their own selfish gain. How even others would despise the brave ones for their bravery because deep down they only hate their own scared loneliness. When Harry has his final dream before the end of the game he remembers his ex-lover leaving to another city, not simply thousands of kilometres away but separated from him by an impenetrable void as if reaching out to one another is physically impossible once every last word has been said.

What the world builders of Elysium succeeded with the Pale is that it is not one clear-cut metaphor for one specific thing in our world but is interpretable as many different metaphors. For instance, in a more discreet reading the Pale is a metaphor for nihilism, a cold acceptance that the past is unchangeable and the future is lost. Inherently and somewhat paradoxically, the world of Elysium accepts a deterministic viewpoint. It posits that everything, even people's hopes, dreams, imagination, is bound by the second law of thermodynamics and collective humanity will reach a point of historical maximum entropy - a cultural stasis where nothing new will be possible. One of the four ideologies the game describes adheres specifically to this nihilistic worldview, Moralism, and when interacting with the people in Martinaise the player will find that many people belief in this ideology, too. Harry's Partner, Kim, for example. We also have an ideology in our world hoping to put the status quo in stone, no more change, no more progress. We call this ideology conservatism.

My political awakening came in university. Not through academics, of course, but the people I've met and the actions that we took. For the first time I came to understand that there is another world out there, a world filled entirely with hopes and visions of a future where everyone could finally be free. Not only free from harm and insecurity, but a freedom to actualise all your own potential.

Freedom even became the topic of my thesis. I found the word puzzling: Why is it that the Western liberal world was so obsessed with freedom when it was only ever interested in so small an interpretation of what freedom could mean? Of course, this question was also an interrogation of why I failed to look beyond the myopic scope of my Liberal upbringing.

When interrogating the mystery behind the Pale the player will not only understand it as a place of horror and of impending doom they will simultaneously realise everybody's indifference to its existence as something that by virtue of always having existed (at least where any single human is concerned) cannot be so bad. Here, the Pale manifests itself as yet another metaphor. A cursory glance at our own world's reluctance to change in light of the impending climate catastrophe clearly suffices to make the connection between Elysium and our world.

Through this metaphor the crassness of how ill-equipped all four shown ideologies of Disco Elysium are to tackle the future becomes visible: Fascism would burn on cinder coals everyone undeserving no matter the costs, idiotically trying to turn back the wheels of time to somewhen that never existed anyway; Ultraliberalism only cares for more articles of consumption while the smokestacks grow ever taller, with no care if there is anything or anyone left to be able to consume; Communism, too, wants to see the smokestacks of its factories rise for the glorified worker to toil away in, glorified and unfree; and Moralism/conservatism in love with the status quo so much that the imminent doom is welcomed as the ultimate end of any change. The world-weariness of Harry's quest through Martinaise hits as hard as it does because it is a mirror for everyone daring to hope for a better world in the here and now. How do you dream of a different, a better world when it is - as the adage ascribed chiefly to Mark Fisher goes - easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? The Pale as a physical manifestation of the Fisher-Paradox.

Whenever Mark Fisher is brought up people usually refer to his Capitalist Realism work and the way he diagnoses the disease we call Capitalism that is plaguing humanity. What is often left out (forgotten, one might say) is his project on Hauntology. Coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx, hauntology describes the study of how something that does not exist still shapes the way we experience our world. As the title of the book makes clear, Derrida created this word in direct reference to the demise of communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama's famous proclamation of the end of history. Fisher with his encyclopaedic knowledge of literature, film and music, pursued these hauntological studies by analysing British music of the 90s and early 2000s, interested in how culture seems to have lost the desire or idea of a future better than the present. In particular, Fisher was fascinated by artists who would conjure an eerie haunting by purposefully evoking genres of the past but by making them explicitly anachronistic. As Fisher writes:

We live in a time when the past is present, and the present is saturated with the past. Hauntology emerges as a crucial—cultural and political—alternative both to linear history and to postmodernism's permanent revival. What is mourned most keeningly in hauntological records, it often seems, is the very possibility of loss. With ubiquitous recording and playback, nothing escapes, everything can return.

Disco Elysium, too, exhibits eerie hauntings in its game world especially when interacting with the Pale. For instance, communicating across the Pale to far-away places - as when Harry calls his ex-lover - always involves static noises and sometimes the voices of past communications (known as entroponetic crosstalk in Elysium) seeping into the connection. Another place the player can witness these hauntings is with the intercom on one of the buildings where "a recording [was] trapped in the circuitry", endlessly repeating the same one-sided dialogue.

Robert Kurvitz's novel Sacred and Terrible Air - which predates Disco Elysium and is the only other official source about the game's setting, the world of Elysium, and the Pale in particular - is obsessed with the question of what happens when things, people, or concepts are forgotten. More radical than Mark Fisher, Kurvitz posits the question: If they are forgotten, do they cease to exist even in the past? One of the examples described in the novel is the fate of the Harnankur, a luxury cruise ship able to traverse the Pale and the first of its kind. Shortly after its first venture into the Pale it supposedly drifted off course, it and its 1500 passengers never to be seen again. But what is interesting is what came after: over time people forgot that the shop and the tragedy of its maiden voyage ever existed - and when nobody remembered the Harnankur even its physical traces within the world began to fade. One such example being a photograph of the luxury liner with hundreds of people in the background waving at ... nothing but a blue sky. In the world of Elysium, only the active remembrance of something keeps it physically attached to reality otherwise it'll belong to the netherworld of the Pale. What a bummer such a world must be for historians.

I became an anarchist. Well, an anarcho-syndicalist, -socialist, -feminist, -pacifist, eco-anarchist. If there is one thing the freedom of anarchism gives you it is the freedom to be part of any and all philosophical streams you feel allegiance to and being a staunch defender of these against any philosophical enemy. Anyone who has ever dealt with leftists knows well that sectarianism is part of the game. I was so enamoured with the beliefs of anarchism that once I did not cast my vote at a state election. That election was noteworthy as the fascist Neo-Nazi party NPD was said to potentially enter the parliament if enough people voted for them and not enough for other parties.2 I still carry that shame with me.

Of course, what being an anarchist gets you most of all, though, is into fights with communists. I came to appreciate that not every strand of communism is equal. This should come as no surprise for anyone with a little bit of historical knowledge as only few would claim that the USSR was, truly, communist. Strands like Stalinism or Maoism only wielding the words of communist thinkers while focussing their ambitions on the consolidation of their power and imperialist agendas, the material condition of the worker be damned.3 And though I remained amicable to my communist comrades, I always found it vexing that one should work towards a revolution of freedom only to immediately give it away to an amorphous Party.

If you've never heard of anarchism before or just have a very vague idea what it is ("something to do with terrorism, right?") then you are in good company. Nowadays, anarchism is practically extinct from political discourse, at best only referred to pejoratively when populists try to denigrate particularly radical opponents. But more than 150 years ago it was a major school of thought during and in the aftermath of the springtime of the people revolutions in the mid-19th century. And one that soon rivaled Marx's communism so much so that Marx and Engels agitated against them, causing the first major case of leftist infighting and the fall of the First (and arguably only true) International, a federation of Western trade unions and left-wing political groups that sought to liberate the working class. From the First International came the Socialist International, then the Bolsheviks under Lenin, the October Revolution, the Soviet Union and finally the atrocities of Stalin and the Cold War. This is the history of the political left as immortalised in history books, the history of communism, the history that is leaving out anarchism.

Anarchists believe that any form of hierarchy - including democratic welfare states - inevitably lead to oppression and social injustices. True liberation for humans can only be achieved when there is ultimately no one with more or less power than anybody else. No wonder then that Mikhail Bakunin and his compatriots immediately saw where Marx's endeavours to transform the First International into a political party would ultimately result into - not a dictatorship by the proletariat but a dictatorship of the proletariat - and how history would prove them devastatingly right. If anarchism is remembered in our world at all the above is usually the extent of it. What is not remembered are the lasting achievements of anarchism, chief among them probably the co-operative, a form of corporation where every member has the same stake and the same share in what happens next and what each and every one gets out. Co-operatives are a widespread form of many types of organisations - not just in video games - and contrary to popular belief can be made up of tens of thousands of members. In 2016 the UNESCO recognised co-operatives as an intangible cultural heritage. But even beyond the co-operative, every grassroots organisation building something to make change in the world today builds upon anarchist concepts through the collective and passed on knowledge on how to organise horizontally. To this day, the International Workers Day commemorates a general strike in Boston which was led by anarchists4. The heritage of anarchism is all around us but anarchism itself barely remembered. While we have streets and parks commemorating communist luminaries like Rosa Luxemburg even today (and rightfully so), where are the Gustav Landauer streets, the Emma Goldman parks and the Pierre-Joseph Proudhon schools5?

This is perhaps the most fascinating metaphor the Pale represents, the undoing of the past by the present. What we perceive as our reality is barely more than mythmaking augmented by some hypothesis about the universe's physical properties. History only that which we deem necessary to remember. The world of Elysium, too, had people believing in anarchism. We hear about the anarchists mainly from our chief expository character Joyce Messier when she says: "[...] the communists -- they all got shot in the head. Oh, and the anarchists too! They shot them well. So well one forgets they even existed." The world of Elysium physically forgets what is not remembered and so the dreams of anarchists have died with them, too.

After graduating and getting my first ever full-time job I thought I'd give capitalism the benefit of the doubt and see if maybe it's not so bad as all the anti-capitalist tomes I've read are making it out to be. After all, I've never actually been a worker and my ideas were all theoretical until now. This was a very short period of my life, not even surviving a single week.

I did lose faith in anarchism, though. When you surround yourself with highly intelligent, able-bodied people who are all reading the same material as you it becomes easy to forget that not everybody possesses the same opportunities to discuss everything. Being outside the comforts of university, working for the first time all day with people from many modes of life, I realised that the anarchist utopia would not only require a completely different social upbringing - something that theoretically could be overcome given enough time - for some it would always be quite impossible to even participate. In fact, to this day I find it exceptionally hard to explain all the details and complexities of the truly free society that I can imagine to someone - my parents for example. And that is just the communicative aspect, how about people with physical or mental disabilities? If not everyone is able to have their voices heard then anarchism as a utopia can never become a reality.

As stated above, the Final Cut edition of Disco Elysium added "Political Vision Quests" that let the player make Harry become a disciple of one (and only one) of the four possible ideologies. The Moralist vision quest even lets the player pursue the only alternative ending of the game (not counting Harry dying due to actions in the game) wherein Harry makes contact with one of the airships and is able to be taken aboard. The game then ends with a shot of a newspaper describing that two weeks later there's still no information on the whereabouts of Harry and that that has led to "increased tensions between the citizens of Martinaise, the RCM [the police], and Coalition authorities." There are multiple interpretations of this alternative ending not least of which is that Harry has been extra-judicially killed in an action reminiscent of CIA interventions. But I prefer the interpretation that Harry is still alive, working for the MoralIntern as he now has "Taken on La Responsibilité" - which is the name of the Moralist vision quest. Here, being responsible and moral means to leave the material world behind, to not care for the people left behind, everything staying exactly the same. Harry not even finishing the murder investigation.

This is in contrast with the communist vision quest. In it Harry is making contact with an "underground book club" run by two college students where they read and philosophise about "forbidden" communist books. One of those books is called "A Brief Look at Infra-Materialism" which is the belief that a strong enough political belief can directly affect the material world. In the best ending of this quest Harry will help the two college students build a tower out of matchboxes that is actually physically impossible and inherently unstable. But if Harry has - across the runtime of the game - repeatedly shown a belief in communism the tower will stand for a few minutes, thus proving Infra-Materialism true. Here the game explicitly shows us a way on how to fight the Pale: if enough people would dream of a future and organise themselves to politically bring this future about then the Pale would slowly deteriorate. In other words, to combat the socio-economic stasis of the status quo people have to start dreaming of a better future for all and get themselves organised.

Of course, the impossible tower only holds for so long until it comes crashing down. Like in our world, communism in Elysium is little more than a failed project and the fancy of a few college under-graduates. What becomes apparent when viewed from the lense of hauntology is that when analysing the four main ideologies of Disco Elysium none of them have actual visions for a future. All of them are focused on either a romanticised past or the calcification of the status quo. Even our dreamers of communism are only running after theories and ideas imagined by long dead thinkers. Here, then, we circle back to the initial impression of Disco Elysium: that of a broken world trapped in the status quo, even your main character so hung up on the past he drinks himself into oblivion. In the end, it is not only Martinaise that is stuck in limbo, it is the entire world.

It sounds ludicrous to go looking for something in a fictional work if what you're looking for is barely mentioned. However, anarchism's absence in Disco Elysium is fascinating since from the little information we do get we can deduce, firstly, that the authors clearly know of anarchism and anarchists role in our world's revolutionary history and, secondly, that anarchism did exist in the world of Elysium, too. Like a black hole that can only be measured by how it physically warps its surroundings anarchism's history leaves a gravitational field in Disco Elysium noticeable to those who look.

It makes thematic sense to not give anarchism as much space as to the other ideologies. Harrier Du Bois is after all a cop deliberately working for a semi-legitimate police force in a city under internationalist occupation. How could such a person ever grasp that any form of authority is already an impeachment on others' liberties? A police force is necessary in all the ideologies Harry can subscribe to (Moralism, Ultraliberalism, communism and of course fascism) but is hardly compatible for a hard-line anarchist. What is more, if you read the conclusions to most thoughts in Harry's Thought Cabinet you will notice that you cannot really change who Harry is but mostly make him re-become his former self (with all the contradictions a human's life-world entails). Harry - our avatar of Elysium - simply cannot be an anarchist.

More importantly, the absence of anarchism in Disco Elysium can be interpreted as a form of social and ideological critique. Leaving out anarchism from the game reflects how we in our own world are dealing with our own anarchist history. Remember what Joyce said: "one forgets [the anarchists] even existed." Both our world and the world of Elysium are haunted by anarchism in exactly the sense Mark Fisher meant to use the word hauntology:

[...] hauntology refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour). The 'spectre of communism' that Marx and Engels had warned of in the first lines of the Communist Manifesto was just this kind of ghost: a virtuality whose threatened coming was already playing a part in undermining the present state of things.

It took me a while to figure out that anarchism is an idea not a recipe. In complete contrast to communism, especially Soviet-style, Stalinist or Maoist communism, the anarchist utopia is exactly that, a utopia, a place that does not exist. The road leading there is infinitely long and at any point you can stop, look around and will still find injustice. But you may also look back and hopefully can claim that where you stand now is at least a little bit better - maybe not for everyone but at least those you could help along the way. Maybe some day we do find it possible as a species to let go of arbitrary and lethal borders on a map, that a free world should be the place we can imagine. But until then we keep fighting for the idea on the horizon.

Whether we call that road anarchism or communism or something else entirely is actually irrelevant. What is important is that we do not stop. I know it would be so easy and comfortable to just step off the road and rest. But the cost of that would be too high. Not only because there are those among us who would like nothing more than a retreat into older times with the glint of greed in their eyes. But because we would leave so many others on the road stranded.

This is why the Pale would less than 30 years after the events of Disco Elysium ultimately succeed and cover the entirety of its world. The past finally erasing the present and future. For unlike our own world, Elysium only has failed ideologies and a nihilist belief in the status quo. But we might still have a chance. Not by embracing anarchism but by embracing what anarchists have always stood for: a future for everyone, a future where no-one is lower or higher than the next and no-one goes hungry. Look around and you will find - amidst this doom and evil monarchs in high places - myriads of groups of all kinds of stripes already working on bringing this future about. A rainbow of good created in this world right now.

This might be the ultimate moral of Disco Elysium: do not give in to the nihilism of the status quo. Dream, and do, and hope, and believe that there is a better tomorrow.

fin

  1. As a side note: I do not like the description of Revachol being under military occupation as that brings into mind real world occupations like Gaza pre-2023. Rather, the description of the occupation is by far more comparable to that of Bosnia-Herzegovina which to this day has a not democratically elected High Representative with extensive presidential powers and who is appointed by a Peace Implementation Council made up of around 40 countries from all over the world (but mostly the EU). Like the people in Revachol, the people in Bosnia and Herzegovina lack political, democratic autonomy but are otherwise free (in the neoliberal sense of the 21st century). ↩︎
  2. In German federal and state-level elections, parties must surpass a hurdle of 5% of the sum total of cast votes to be granted seats in the parliament. ↩︎
  3. Not that that would detract people from actively calling themselves Stalinists or Maoists, of course. A similar incredulity as calling oneself a Neo-Nazi this causes. ↩︎
  4. And saw eight leading anarchists put unlawfully to trial when the strike escalated, with seven of them sentenced to death ↩︎
  5. As a matter of truth, there is one street called Gustav-Landauer-Bogen in Munich, an Emma Goldman park in Peru, and a Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Middle School Besançon, France. Unlike Elysium, it seems, our world does not entirely forget. ↩︎