Semiotics of the End:
Essays on Capitalism and the Apocalypse (2025)
by Alessandro Sbordoni
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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 possible resolution.” — Slavoj Žižek |
Authored by Alessandro Sbordoni and Matt Bluemink
Illustrations by Palais Sinclaire
Layout & Typography by Polymnia Tsinti
Metadata:
Cat#: BECOMING006
Dimensions: 11x18cm
Binding: Perfect Bound
Pages: 124 pages
ISBN: 978-9925-8118-6-1 (Print), 978-9925-8118-7-8 (Digital)
Paper: 300g/m2 Tintaretto Ceylon & 80g/m2 Munken White
Language: English
Edition: Second (Version 2)
Released: 29th September 2025
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.
About:
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 second edition was published October 2024, but has now been redesigned once again, as a second version of the second edition, in September 2025. The text is identical in every way, including the pagination, but the presentation has been developed and improved.
The backcover reads:
Unlike its Christian predecessor, the eschatology of capitalism hits different. 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.
Contents:
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 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.