Semiotics of the End: Essays on Capitalism and the Apocalypse

Semiotics of the End: Essays on Capitalism and the Apocalypse
Alessandro Sbordoni

118 pages

Becoming Press, 2024

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“To quote Alessandro Sbordoni: ‘as the end gets nearer, more is yet to come’,  so maybe we already live in the end of the world, an end which stretches on endlessly, with no resolution possible.” — Slavoj Žižek, Against Progress

Second edition featuring an afterword from Matt Bluemink (Institute of Network Cultures). This book, superbly titled, contains 14 essays that investigate the semiotics of the end, “as just another sign of semiocapitalism”. There is no Apocalypse to come, it has, in a sense, already happened—if every end is a beginning, then there is no end to the reproduction of the world in accordance with the semio-logic of capitalism, which auto-generates as infinitely as the internet’s Backrooms do.

The backcover reads: 

“The apocalypse as such will not take place, as it is already finished. Today, there is no longer any difference between the end of the world and capitalism itself: from Britney Spears’ Till the World Ends to The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time, from Avenger’s Endgame to Donnie Darko, and all the way down to the internet’s Backrooms, the world never ends but is reproduced again and again according to the semio-logic of capital.

In contrast with Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, Semiotics of the End is a manifesto for the imagination of another relationship with the end. If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as Slavoj Žižek, Fredric Jameson, and Mark Fisher put it, it is only because we have not imagined anything yet. The end is just the beginning."