Three Forms of the End of the World

Why we Need an Apocalypse in Order to Carry On

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David Cronenberg’s The Fly ( 1986) is a breathtaking and radical piece of subversive political analysis. Yet as popular as the film is, few people have noticed the important difference between this film and the original 1957 short story by George Langelaan. Despite the genius of Cronenberg’s adaptation, Langelaan’s original asks a very different question: how can we understand catastrophe, how can we recognise an absolute end, when it has already occurred? If something like disaster is around the corner, how may we confront the possibility that it has already taken place, that we are playing a perpetual game of catch-up with the reality of our own situation?

From nuclear disaster, the dissolution of a global order by Trump’s tariffs, or the threat of an unthinkable ecological catastrophe, the idea of the ‘end of times’ is especially popular today. We are rightly concerned with the possibility of the end of the world, but this makes it all the more pressing to ask what we truly mean by the term ‘end’. Here, I argue that there are three, entirely irreconcilable, ideologies of the end, all of which carry a weight in any possible political solution.

1: The Desire for the End

The basic idea of The Fly (the story and the film adaptations), is the perfect rendition of apocalyptic speculations. Something terrible is happening or has happened. A grotesque mutation or a dizzying catastrophe of scientific innovation, where in a Ballardesque spectacle the cultural experimentations of man brutally merges him on the cellular level with an unnatural reconstruction of the natural world (a fly, in this case). The first form of the end is the one we see in Cronenberg’s adaptation. This the pragmatist’s ideal version of the end: although initially shocking - possibly even exhilarating - it is eventually calculable, comprehensible, and entertainingly inevitable, it constructs a new mode of desiring.

Seth Brundle’s gradual mutation is a certain march towards an unrecoverable catastrophe. Although initially believing that he has simply been ‘rejuvenated’ by the teleportation, looking into the dematerialisation logs reveals that a fly had got into the transmitter. It is soon certain that a terrible catastrophe is imminent, yet this knowledge does not lead to any preventative measures, but only renders its imminent arrival all the more certain. This compulsive, automated march towards the end is the same process we see in Ballard’s The Drowned World: chief researcher Robert Kerans becomes aware that the continued rise in global temperatures which has already submerged Europe under water will kill him if he stays put, but be begins to fetishise this destruction, to embellish it with archetypal fantasies and a type of excessively self-destructive enjoyment.

This figuration of an absolute limit, a limit that serves as a continued source of compulsive enjoyment, is nothing less than the Freudian death drive. The death drive is not simple aggressiveness - it is, as Jean Laplanche argued, an extension of sexuality itself: the enjoyment of the absolute limit of the enjoying subject. The fetishisation of a failed relation. This was my central point in an upcoming review for Radical Philosophy of Alenka Zupančič’s Disavowal: it is not enough to claim that ideology functions by disavowing, for example, the climate disaster. It is not enough to claim that, by knowing about it, we permit ourselves to act as if it is not happening. Instead, an element of self-destructive enjoyment, of a desire that acts against itself, must be introduced. In order to account for how we think of the end of times, we must try to rehabilitate the out-of-fashion notion of the death drive.

2: The End that Precedes Itself

In the original short story of the Fly, however, we see the second form, a temporally warped version, of the end: the story begins with the scientist André Delambre (Seth Brundle in the 1986 adaptation) already having met with his grotesque metamorphosis, and already having been killed in a hydraulic press by his wife Hélène. The question, therefore, is no longer about our attitude towards a certain end, but of a retrospective reconstruction of how it is that the end has already occurred.

The catastrophe itself is an initially empty enigma. Unlike Cronenberg’s version, the focus of the story is not about the inevitable transformation of the scientist into an insect-human hybrid, but about the reconstruction of a violent, deathly transformation that has already taken place. In this form of the end, the end is questioned only once it is being lived - a retroactive construction of what took place: François, brother of the dead scientist and an investigator in the case, discovers the grotesque sequence of events in a letter only after both his brother and his sister-in-law are dead.

On the level of global and political catastrophe, the same variation of the theme of the end plays out in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (published in the same year as Langelaan’s original short story). Set in Australia and a surviving US Naval submarine, whatever global horror it was that led to a radioactive fallout, it has already taken place. Yet what exactly took place, not when it is going to take place, is the most prominent question. This is a speculative historiography - reconstructing hypotheticals about a three-way nuclear fallout between Russia, China, and the US. To confront the end means reaching beyond the end point we are already situated in.

Like Lacan’s description of the trace of an event that attains an expressible, signifying meaning only once it is already erased, the second form of the end is a past horror that is known only by erasing itself, by having occurred only insofar as it remains imperceptible. The fatal insight is mutated from a compulsive drive towards an absolute limit-point, into a guessing-game from beyond the grave. This is the ideological implication of Nabokov’s The Eye (1930). The novel’s protagonist begins his story from the obscure possibility that he may already be dead, but that - like the Freudian trope - ‘he does not know it yet’. Unsure whether he successfully committed suicide after being humiliatingly beaten by the husband of his lover, the imagination of his ‘eye’ wanders the city streets in a virtual retrospective from the perspective of his own death.

The same logic recurs in screen interpretations of mass shootings and child murderers, such as the Netflix TV-show Adolescence (2025) or Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (2024). Both of these begin with the act itself which would be seen as the end-point: with the murder. These shows thereby reframe Thomas Aquinas’ inversion of the Aristotelian relation between potency and act. Potency (or possibility) may precede the act, but it is not enough to say that we begin with the possibility of something and that following this we arrive at its eventual occurrence. The potency-act relation does not arise out of nothing: it requires an initial discrepancy which frames the notion of an act that potency may eventually actualise. In other words, act, as secondary, begins by preceding the primacy of potency. Act emerges as an a-temporal disjunction which retroactively furnishes a certain potency that can lead to this act. We begin, therefore, with the end - and this end furnishes the presuppositions for its own emergence. The end has, in other words occurred - climate change is not only irreversible but already taking place. The true problem is of retroactively constructing a collective narrative which allows us to recognise that we are already living the end.

3: The End as Asymptotic Continuity

All of these variations on the end, on catastrophe, on the point of no return, inevitably miss the more obvious question: what do we even mean by ‘the end’? At what point can we admit that something has truly come to an end? The end, I argue, is neither a determinate future-point, nor can we somehow argue that we have already reached it. The end is a far more abnormal category. I would appropriate Chesterton’s formulation on Christianity here: if both of these opposed forms do and do not apply to the notion of the end, then perhaps they are not wrong, but perhaps it is ‘the end’ itself that has a very peculiar shape. The third form of the end is a point of virtual support, an intimately alien limit-point appropriated by the very system which is decomposing - this, if anything, is what we can make of the end today. The end of things as they are today is the very thing which at the same time indefinitely prolongs today.

The unpleasant reality of the end is that it is indefinite, an asymptotic, never-ending approach to a pure hypothetical, a hypothetical which is in turn relativised, framed according the very ideological structure to which the idea of ‘end’ is implied as an absolute, exterior limit. It is a type of mockery of the Hegelian point that to posit a limit is to immediately place oneself on the other side of this limit. Capitalism places itself in what Octave Mannoni would call its own ‘other scene’: the disorienting ‘opening’ irreducible to signification which is nonetheless articulated and carried by the act of signification itself. Capitalism flaunts the end of capitalism as one of its very own principles, by commodifying the very notion of the end.

What better example is there of this performative embrace of a perpetual, politicised end than the doomsday clock? I referred to this in a piece I wrote criticising Slavoj Žižek, but it is worth repeating in this context. Each year, ‘experts’ from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board gather to decide on how far from ‘midnight’, or the end, we currently are. And yet the strange this is that any frame or understanding of this End of global capitalism is dictated by those international experts which capitalism elected as its representatives. The irony here seems to go mostly unnoticed: an international organisation of experts, gathering on a structured yearly schedule to discuss the speculative possibility of the absolute end of any form of civil organisation or structure. On several occasions, the doomsday clock has been moved back from midnight, not because we have managed to ‘avert crisis’, but because it a temporarily bad investment to manufacture worry about an ‘end’ which can be made profitable. Whatever this end is that we so easily speak of, it is an End not external to, but internally thinkable by, today’s global market.

In Summa contra Gentiles, Thomas Aquinas, perhaps one of the most relevant critics of ideology in the Scholastic tradition, makes fruitful use of this internalisation of an inexpressible difference. The ultimate Good of human projects is, Aquinas argues, union with God. Yet this union is impossible by intellectual deduction. The reality of God is in perpetual excess of our rational intellectual capacities. Faith, on the other hand, reaches a point of union with God that intellectual deduction cannot, but it does so in an inconsistent way. Faith simply subsumes the irreconcilable distance between mankind and God in the act of faith itself. Faith embodies its own distance towards its object, and the superiority of intellect over faith is to recognise its own inferiority, and the contingency of both faith and intellect.

Ultimate Goodness - which is also the object of desire for Aquinas - is therefore beyond finite human existence: it eventually becomes identified with death. Humans desire the end of their own finitude, the end of their insufficient grasp of God, so much so that true desiring, the desire for the Goodness of God, is nothing other than a desire of death. Yet the Scholastic solution here is not simply to commit suicide. It is rather to perpetuate this end of finitude by endlessly reproducing it in out finite, imperfect knowledge. Goodness in a sense presupposes the end of the human pursuit of Goodness, but this end has to be maintained in suspension: it is a perpetual sliding towards an end that is kept present and articulated by the very fact that it cannot be reached.

Thomas Aquinas’ reading of death translates perfectly to today’s apocalyptic visions: we can think of an end only insofar as we can frame it in the form of permanent continuity, an asymptotic approach to a virtual opening. The only thing which persists, which never meets an end, is the idea of an end itself. Instead, the perpetual use of the end lifelessly drags itself towards an unattainable real point.

In order for a political structure to continue, it must furnish the notion of its own end. This is the impersonal Freudian mechanism embodied by the most pernicious systems: outrightly denying or repressing a catastrophic possibility (‘I do NOT desire my mother…’ or ‘there is no end whatsoever in sight’) only serves to counterintuitively affirm it. Avowing the end, on the other hand, makes possible a more sophisticated deference by the fact of appropriating this end. The end becomes required as the horrifying bulwark against the end itself. Speculating on the end, or even desiring it, thus only serves to justify the very system that is presumed to be ending. This, therefore, is the third form of the end of the world. It is also the third version of The Fly that I would create: where the anticipation that Seth Brundle will turn into a fly is more horrifying than the act itself of turning into a fly.

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