SEMIOTICS OF THE END: ESSAYS ON CAPITALISM & THE APOCALYPSE (2024)
by Alessandro Sbordoni
“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
Back before the first edition of Semiotics of the End was published by the established Institute of Network Cultures, we joined Blue Labyrinths and NON in promoting three excerpts from what looked like a very promising book. We anticipated the first edition with some excitement, and we were secretly wishing we could have been the publisher, so when the author approached us about a second edition, we were delighted to facilitate.
This book contains 13 essays (14 including Matt Bluemink’s Afterword) about the plethora of signs that constitute our understanding of “the End”, exploring the boring, the exhausted, the doomed, the looping and more. The book is drenched in music, as well as other references to icons of popular and internet culture. 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.”
CONTENTS
• Essay One: Not with a Bang, but a Yawn
• Essay Two: Capitalism and Dark Media
• Essay Three: After the End of All Things
• Essay Four: Meltdown Now
• Essay Five: Violence Against the Imaginary
• Essay Six: Overdrive and Meaning: Les Rallizes Dénudés
• Essay Seven: Doom Loop Forever
• Essay Eight: Technology Degree Zero
• Essay Nine: To Sleep, Perchance...
• Essay Ten: Welcome to the Virtual Plaza
• Essay Eleven: The Backrooms
• Essay Twelve: The Ghost in Architecture
• Essay Thirteen: Anti-Hauntology
• Afterword: New Beginnings by Matt Bluemink
BIOS
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 lives in London and works for the Open Access publisher Frontiers.
Matt Bluemink is a philosopher and writer from London. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Blue Labyrinths magazine. Matt’s research is focused on the relationship between the philosophy of technology, media theory and urbanism. He also writes on contemporary music, literature, and digital culture.
DETAILS
• Authored by Alessandro Sbordoni
• Afterword by Matt Bluemink
• CAT #BECOMING006
• ISBN: 978-9925-8118-6-1 (Print)
• ISBN: 978-9925-8118-7-8 (Digital)
• 18 x 11 cm, Softcover, 117 pages
• Second edition, September 2024
TO BE CITED AS
Sbordoni, A. (2024) Semiotics of the End: Essays on Capitalism and the Apocalypse. 2nd Edition. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming. 978-9925-8118-6-1.
*PDF coming soon