The Optimism of Apocalypse
Review of After the End: Fragments of the Apocalypse Industry by Rafael Holmberg (Zer0 Books, 2026)
Martin Torrin
Are the Transformers films actually a theological exercise? Did post-War capitalism invent the Doomsday Clock to avoid really having to think about the end of the world? Is there a strange method by today’s political elite to monetise the apocalypse in order to profit from something we cannot understand? These are just some of the many claims made by Rafael Holmberg in After the End: Fragments of the Apocalypse Industry. The book seems to have two main claims: we cannot define the end (the end of capitalism and more acutely the end of the world), and the cultural commodification of the apocalypse in cinema and in consumer trends is actually capitalism’s method of weaponizing the absence of any real definition of “the end”.
Holmberg generally seems to focus on contradiction as a way of understanding everything from politics to metaphysics. There is a type of mirrored constitution between the two: metaphysics should be seen as crucial in thinking politics, and yet political deadlocks are foundational in understanding the ontological conditions of our world. Todd McGowan seems to note this when he says about After the End that “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.” It is probably important to acknowledge that our capitalist-political relations have some ontological foundations that make them impossible to solve easily.
But do we really need another attempt at blending ontology and politics? This seems to have become the fashionable philosophical thing since German idealism. For Fichte and for Hegel – and for so many European philosophers since them – political and ethical relations always have some type of foundation in ontological moments and metaphysical progressions. Has anything really changed? Are we any better off because we have ‘ontologised politics’?
Though after reading After the End, it does not sound like Holmberg is giving us yet another attempt at metaphysically rethinking our political systems, nor is he just ontologising politics to provide clearer definitions of what is going on today. His real claim is that the doomsday fixations we see everywhere come to repeat a more difficult problem: the end cannot be defined. There is no ‘re-defining’ possible here, since the idea of an existential limit works precisely by rejecting the stasis of definition. The ontological angle simply supports this argument: whether it is with Kant or with theology, we cannot have a politics that confronts the end of the world because, even metaphysically, finitude is a self-defeating idea. In one text, we are encouraged to ontologise politics, as well as put a stop to both ontology and politics.
So maybe the central outcome of After the End is not so much an ontological approach to politics, but an epistemological one? As subjects and consumers, we can begin by trying to understand how obviously oxymoronic categories like sustainable consumerism, ecological capitalism, and all manic depictions of the apocalypse, in fact play on our inability to conceptualise the very limit they reproduce and manufacture. We cannot know what the apocalypse possibly means for the same reason that ‘the end of capitalism’ is a problem both with capitalism and the end – and so we are left speaking about the apocalypse incessantly.
If we begin by knowing that discourses on the end of capitalism are not opposed to the notion of the end of the world, but that they are both caught in the same trap, maybe our efforts (practical and theoretical) can be aimed elsewhere? Holmberg does not rely on a better philosopher of the end that will help clarify things. He instead relies on Kafka or Ballard – two writers who understood just how much our frantic approach to the end is only possible because of the more harrowing fact that we never quite get there. We never get to the terminal confrontation or battle. What is truly horrifying is to have our approaching collapse endlessly postponed. Maybe Holmberg’s book is another attempt at ontologising politics, or maybe it wants us to look at new possible solutions.
Martin Torrin is an Irish writer and occasional culture enthusiast living in London where he does everything from reading postmodern philosophy and write about animals to consult on film projects and make mediocre cocktails.