Semiotics of the End: Essays on Capitalism & the Apocalypse (2025)
Author: Alessandro Sbordoni
Afterword: Matt Bluemink
Edition: 2nd (v2)
Date: September 2025
CatNO: (becoming)06B
ISBN: 978-9925-8118-6-1 (Print)
Language: English
Format: Softcover
Binding: Perfect Bound
Dimensions: 11cm x 18cm
Pages: 124
Umschlag: Tintoretto Ceylon 300g/m2
Inhalt: Munken White Vol 1.75 80g/m2
Layouts & Design by Becoming
(Claire Elise,
& Polymnia)
To be cited as:
Sbordoni, A. (2025) Semiotics of the End: Essays on Capitalism and the Apocalypse. 2nd Edition. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming. 978-9925-8118-6-1.
“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 possible resolution." — Slavoj Žižek
In place of locusts, plagues and horse riders, the end appears to us as rising sea-levels, nuclear war, or A.I. uprisings. While this impending doom ought to frighten us more, it has become blasé, even comedic, for capital has captured our teleological imaginations, and has sold our demise right back to us; as we suspend our belief in its existence, our entire relationship with the future has changed.
Yet, where Mark Fisher’s cancellation of the future leaves us feeling helpless, the work of Alessandro Sbordoni attempts to reverse this hauntological approach through a restoration of the potenza of the future as a nothingness that nonetheless haunts us; feedback from the future guides the present. If there is an end, it is also a beginning, which means the future is still up for grabs.
This book contains thirteen essays reflecting on capital’s relationship with its own end, from cultural analyses of Britney Spears, Donnie Darko or the Internet’s Backrooms, to strategic theories that frame culture as a series of weapons to be used to subvert and change the cultural hegemony of our time, and ward off the ghosts of the past.”
Having been originally published, in its first edition, by Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, Becoming Press has prepared, at the author’s request, a second edition of this work, which includes an afterwork written by Matt Bluemink, to whom we attribute the term “anti-hauntology”. This is still the second edition of the book, but a new version of it which mainly involved a redesign of the book to be in line with Becoming's 2025 style.
About the author
Alessandro Sbordoni was born in Cagliari in 1995. He is the author of The Shadow of Being: Symbolic / Diabolic (2nd edition, Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2023). He is an editor of the British magazine Blue Labyrinths and the Italian magazine Charta Sporca. He works for the Open Access publisher Frontiers.
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