Semiotics of the End: After the End of All Things

This is an excerpt from Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse by Alessandro Sbordoni (Institute of Network Cultures, 2023).

In The End of All Things, Immanuel Kant argues that the end of all things does not derive from the end of time itself but only from the absence of change, whence something is going to be the same forever.

From the point of view of information theory, the information value of such a system is zero: the overall number of states of the system is equal to one. Even so, the reproduction of the system does not end. The end of all things, as revealed by the German philosopher, is without end. It is for ever and ever the repetition of the same.

According to Immanuel Kant, the infinite magnitude of the end ‘is a representation which outrages the imagination.’1placeholder This is already the failure of understanding that is produced in the absence of any concept — and likewise, information. At the same time, the speculative paradigm in which the end of all things has to be thought is the relationship with a particular form of nothingness, a certain kind of failure of representation, and the ineluctable negation of the subject.2placeholder

But this nothingness, even in the horror-like form of absolute extinction and its antithetical representation, is not part of the future anymore; it is now and everywhere at the end of time.

All energy is wasted; the potentiality for change is infinitely approaching zero. It is the future as such, not the end, that is an abomination to the imagination. The eternity of the same makes it impossible to think about the absolute afterward: the future.

The Paralogism of the End

‘But why do human beings expect an end of the world at all?’3placeholder After the end — that is, here and now — the reply and the question are no longer the same (and more of the same). The question that reverberates after the end, rather, is of the form: ‘Why is it not possible to think about the world after the end?’ In contrast with the Kantian approach, the reply following this question is not just a form of speculation but the potentiality of imagination.

The potentiality of the imaginary is to produce another form of information and return another kind of logic to the system. It is to return the value zero of information to the meaningfulness of zeros, which is already the relationship with the future as such.

And ‘why must it always be a terrible end […]?’4placeholder asks again The End of All Things. To which the reply, the Kantian joke: because the present time is execrable. The representation of the future is more often than not the critique of the present time. The great outside, the beyond, and its horror represent as often as not the impotentiality of thinking about the end of the capitalist system and its logic.5placeholder

Even more so, nothingness must go further than the system. Zero against more zeros, the imagination is always after the diagonals of the matrix. The imagination is played against the simulation. Meaning is more than the function of information.

In the second volume of the Horror of Philosophy, Eugene Thacker suggests reading the philosophy of Immanuel Kant from the diagnosis of the metaphysician’s depression. According to this reading, the logic of the imaginary and emotions is to be dominated by the logic (or the pathology) of reason. But what the philosopher of Enlightenment might not have considered is that reason might be the cause of depression. Reason itself — like the techno-logic of the infosphere — in fact, works too fast and too well. So much so that the system of Immanuel Kant fails to find any meaning but, so often, just more of the machinery of capitalism. Depression is another part of the mechanics of capital — as in the phrase economic depression, where depression is not a metaphor but, rather, an example of pleonasm.