After the End

The motto of capitalist realism, that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”, is out of date. We have failed to think the end of capitalism and the world because we have failed to understand the end as such. The dominant ‘apocalypse industry’ exploits this self-obscuring end. Looking at the volatility of aggressive techno-capitalism with its neoliberal and populist deviations, After the End argues that modern political economy weaponizes and manufactures the end in order to occupy both sides of it. Our social and political predicament reflects an obfuscation and commodification of ‘endings’, and this book is therefore a political and philosophical attempt at theorising the end

"Rafael Holmberg’s After the End challenges much of the contemporary political doxa when it comes to the question of the end of capitalism and the end of the world. Rather than accepting the truism that we should politicize ontological questions, Holmberg proposes the daring wager that what we really require today is treating political questions—such as the end of capitalism—through an ontological lens. Until we confront politics philosophically, we will remain stuck in the same political dead ends. It’s a book that forces whole new lines of thought."

• Todd McGowan

"The indefinability of “the end” will endlessly haunt any reader of After the End. Does any attempt - theological, political, ecological - to pronounce an end dissolve into its own repetition? Does apocalypse cancel itself out through perverse self-perpetuation? The reader will finish the book, but fail to be done with Holmberg's enigmatic meditation."

• Catherine Keller, George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology, Drew Theological School. Author of No Matter What: Crisis and the Spirit of Planetary Possibility