"Can we imagine the end?": Rafael Holmberg in conversation with Alexis Papazoglou

Talk about the end of the world is everywhere, from Silicon Valley tech-bros to US Vice President J D Vance. Recent western culture also seems to have been preoccupied with the apocalypse: films like 28 Days Later, Children of Men, or novels like The Drowned World and more recently What We Can Know, try to depict a future in which, in the words of REM, "it's the end of the world as we know it." And in the era of out-of-control climate change, Mark Fisher’s famous motto that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” has become a cliché.

But can we actually imagine what it would be for the world to end? Or are we always just imagining a different world? Are we trying to transcend the limits of our language and thought when we try to imagine the end of the world? And why are we seemingly so preoccupied with thinking about the world ending?

Rafael Holmberg is a political writer, social theorist, and researcher on philosophy and psychoanalysis based at University College London. His work broadly draws on post-war Continental philosophy, German Idealism, Marxism, and psychoanalytic theory. He runs the Substack Antagonisms of the Everyday". His book After the end: Fragments of the apocalypse industry is forthcoming at Zer0 Books.

Alexis Papazoglou is Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously senior editor for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, and a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway. He is also host of the podcast, “The Philosopher and the News”.

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