By Leonardo Foletto and Rafael Bresciani for BaixaCultura
In July 2025, the Italian-born, London-based Alessandro Sbordoni was in Brazil for the launch of Semiótica do Fim: Capitalismo e Apocalipse (first version published as INC  Network Notions #1: Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse), published by SobInfluencia. The book, as we’ve already commented in our presentation text, is a collection of thirteen essays that investigate how the end of the world has become just another sign of semio-capitalism. The thesis – if we can call it that in a text so open to provocations and different readings – is that the end of the world is “just another sign” of semio-capitalism: the apocalypse, as traditionally conceived, will not occur because it is already in permanent course. There is no longer any difference between the end of the world and capitalism itself: both reproduce incessantly according to the semiotic logic of capital, says Sbordoni. His book, then, presents itself as a manifesto that invites us to think about what “end” means today.
On July 17, 2025, one day before the book’s first launch at the head office of SobInfluencia publishing house in downtown São Paulo, we spoke with Alessandro in an Amazonian restaurant inside the gallery. For BaixaCultura, Leonardo Foletto and Rafael Bresciani, with participation from Rodrigo Côrrea, editor and designer at SobInfluencia. Between Cupuaçú amigo (the local version of the “Caju Amigo” drink) and Tacacás (the famous Amazonian “soup” with jambu and tucupi), the conversation ranged from Semiotics of the End to the relationship between high and low culture, anti-hauntology, digital magazines as spaces for intellectual encounter, underground culture, technology, and contemporary theory. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
BaixaCultura: To begin with: how did the idea for the book come about? In what context was it produced? And tell us a bit more about your writing journey.
Alessandro: Around 2020, I read And: Phenomenology of the End by Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Reading it, I found the approach to capital and capitalism very intriguing, something that stayed in my head for a while. I had just written another book about something completely different, but I knew I wanted to do something like that. A few months later, I wrote an essay, which is the first in the book, with a different subtitle, but the main title was “Semiotics of the End.” I didn’t know what would come of it; it was about boredom and the end of the world. I published it on Blue Labyrinths and, a few months later, I published another essay, again with the same title and a different subtitle; then the third essay followed, and so on. Thus, everything started coming together. Obviously, the title “Semiotics of the End” is a reference to “Phenomenology of the End”, and I thought I would do something similar.
The book developed organically. Little by little, I started realizing that I wanted to mix the idea of semio-capitalism as a way to analyze, criticize, and go beyond the idea of capitalist realism in Mark Fisher, which is the core of the book.
Leonardo: Are you a philosopher?
Alessandro: There’s a quote by Guy Debord, who says: “I’m not a philosopher, I’m a strategist.” I’m not a philosopher; maybe, I’m a strategist or I would consider mysel as a theorist, at least. Philosophy carries all this Western cultural baggage with which I do not want to identify myself. I would rather see myself as a theorist, which also brings with it certain problems, such as: I’m not searching for the truth in what I write. I see it more as a political or cultural endeavor, if you prefer, but never searching for truth or knowledge. All that stuff is nonsense…
BaixaCultura: I’d like to ask about Blue Labyrinths and Charta Sporca, two digital magazines that you are engaged in.
Alessandro: I started publishing the first excerpts of the book Semiotics of the End, which were then gathered with other essays inside the book. With Blue Labyrinths, it all started when I read the anti-hauntology essays by the magazine’s founder, Matt Bleumink, which I wanted to expand and, eventually, formed the last chapter of the book. After publishing a few essays on Blue Labyrinths, Matt and I became good friends, and then, little by little, I started playing a role on the editorial board of Blue Labyrinths together with another person.
That’s the story of Blue Labyrinths. For Charta Sporca, I really wanted to publish and do something with them. I first discovered them when I was still in Italy, and I always appreciated the mix of politics, literature, and philosophy, all together.
BaixaCultura: In Blue Labyrinths: what kind of contributions are you looking for? And how does the magazine position itself within the current landscape of cultural and philosophical publications?
Alessandro: It’s quite simple. We accept any submission that we deem interesting for us. If you read the description, it says something very general: “An online magazine focusing on philosophy, culture, and a collection of interesting ideas.” And those two words, “interesting ideas,” are the main part because all magazines and publishers tend to admit that they focus on one thing, maybe because it’s easier or because people have limited understanding. We often publish things that stretch a bit, and we even published some things that we tend to disagree with to a certain extent, even on a political level. Nothing too crazy, of course – I would never publish a fascist piece, that’s for sure. But there have been disagreements, and that’s interesting. For example, it’s been a very good policy because we’ve attracted all those writers who don’t know where else to publish, because all the other magazines are very specific, and if you don’t fit, screw it. So, it was very interesting. And it wasn’t my concept; it was Matt, the founder, who always had this mindset, and I always liked that. I think I was attracted to it because also in my writing I do this: I try to bring in many different things altogether at the same time.
BaixaCultura: And so, why magazines? What do you like about digital magazines?
Alessandro: I personally see them as a kind of cultural gym (in the etymological sense of the term). It’s almost like a testing ground or, if you want, a training in the military sense. It’s like a training for a theory to then really do something important. But no, I just see it as something contingent. Publishers are also contingent. In an ideal world, you would just come together. It’s always a compromise.
BaixaCultura: About Charta Sporca, to me, it appears to engage with contemporary Italian theory and culture, including your own work and figures like Mark Fisher and Deleuze. How does editing this magazine inform your own theoretical development? And what role do you see intellectual and digital magazines playing today, especially in your case? Italian intellectual history has a huge history of magazines, with Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia, and A/Traverso, for example, in the 1960s and 1970s.
Alessandro: For me, the answer is straightforward. Imagine the magazine was a space with which you interact. You go there often and you see what people are doing. And what comes out of it is not just a theory or an idea. Yes, you read interesting pieces, and they may spark something – but that’s never the main and most important thing. The most important thing is that you get to meet the people and you create relationships, as we are doing right now. This is something crucial that I’ve realized in the past few years: the most interesting thing about writing is not writing, it’s getting to meet the people. It’s being part of a “community,” for lack of a better word – even though I never liked the word “community” because it almost demands to be defined. They are encounters. Encounters with the people that you meet do inform your theory, but it’s also contingent, in a sense. Theory is secondary to the reality of meeting someone. So, these magazines are a potentiality for new encounters.
BaixaCultura: And why magazine sites and not, for example, social networks?
Alessandro: Well, because there is a certain autonomy in the magazine. This goes back to what I was saying about those “interesting ideas.” You just welcome everyone in. I’m just happy to meet anyone who has something interesting to say, especially if they disagree. It’s okay.
BaixaCultura: Going back to the book. I read here that your book opens with the provocative statement that “the end of the world is just another sign of semio-capitalism.” Can you explain what led you to this conclusion and how you develop the concept of semio-capitalism as distinct from traditions of capital critique, like in Bifo’s books, for example? If there are differences or not.
Alessandro: There are differences, definitely. I always take all these ideas as starting points. In this sense, I’m not trying to develop the concept of semio-capitalism, but I find it an interesting ground. What happened was that, at some point, the difference between materiality and immateriality, between a culture based on production and actual commodities – the dichotomy between production and reproduction, in the terms I put it – has been abolished. The world has become more ephemeral and immaterial: it’s just a structure of signs. The interesting thing is that capitalism has been able to link itself to the reproduction of signs and reproduce itself through signs, regardless of what the signs mean. This could have been a problem in the past. For example, capitalism entering a radical discourse and making a profit out of it, this could have been a contradiction in the Marxist sense. I think now the discourse has been flattened, since anything can be turned into capital; anything can be a way to reproduce capital. The most extreme form of this is that the end of the world, which would be, logically speaking, the end of capitalism, is just its continuation. Because capitalism feeds off the reproduction even of its own end. Which I thought was an interesting starting point because of the intrinsic irony. I don’t think there is any contradiction, but there is a strong irony and a strong feeling that it should be the starting point for something. And I’m trying to find a way to open up to this new beginning, but I think we have to really think outside the box, because everything that is inside the box is capital.
BaixaCultura: You state that the apocalypse, as such, will not occur because it has already finished. This seems to challenge both religious and secular narratives of ending. How do you situate this claim in relation to the ecological and social crises we are experiencing? And how can we think about other relations with the ending, but how to begin?
Alessandro: There is, again, a sad joke about the climate catastrophe and the endless end of capitalism. As the catastrophe goes on, it reproduces more and more capital, and because it reproduces more and more capital, it will go on faster and faster. And, paradoxically, the few images that we now have, for example, the wildfires happening across the world, are going to increase because capital is going to increase, and capital is these images. Therefore, as capital increases, the end of the world approaches. I don’t see, following this line of reasoning, an end to capital. But as we start relating to culture in a different way and begin to see that these images are nothing but capital, that reproduction is the problem of what they represent, that will be an old way of thinking. The problem is that, if the end of the world is approaching, we are still producing content and we are still producing in a capitalist way. So, on the one hand, a solution could be to find new ways of production, but we’ve entered a new paradigm, which I dub re-production. Many of the different modes of production-reproduction have been neutralized.
So, the only thing that is left to do is to rethink where we are right now. And this is something that Geert Lovink refers to in Extinction Internet: we have to look into the abyss in order to overcome it. It’s also about looking into how this makes us feel. Paradoxically, I talk about this in terms of boredom rather than anxiety, because we are sick and tired of it. It’s been fifty or sixty years of apocalyptic predictions that didn’t come into being, because capital, as I said before, keeps reproducing itself. But if you start from here, and we in a way reshape, repurpose the concept of end and beginning in a metaphysical way – and this is why we’re also talking about philosophy. So, if we rethink what it means to be at the end of the world, as well as what it means that the end and the beginning always coexist. Once we understand this, then this opens up new ways and, in a simple word, a new imaginary.
BaixaCultura: I did a reflection, following this idea of end and beginning. We usually think about human progress as landmarks of success. When things happen positively, we landmark them. And one of these examples is when, on a personal level, we introduce ourselves as professionals, we use a Curriculum Vitae, which means the things we’ve done in life, the good landmarks of our lives. But I once heard a psychologist, who was a trauma psychologist, and who advocated the idea of a Curriculum Mortis, which is the idea that, when we acknowledge the landmarks of failure, we are able to overcome those failures. So, is this view something we can rely on in this Anthropocene, late capitalism moment? Using a Curriculum Mortis of human history as a way to approach this moment.
Alessandro: I see. There was an interesting article recently published in an Italian magazine by an author named Christian Damato, who talks about the fact that failure has been reintegrated into the discourse of success within a corporate ideology. And I think it’s a very bleak statement, yet I believe that merely inverting the problem doesn’t solve it, because in my way of thinking, it’s a question of structures. Just reverting the structure is not creating a new structure, but it may be a means to a new structure. So, even emphasizing failure could potentially be a way to something, but it’s not enough.
Regarding the question of progress, I would argue that progress only exists according to a certain set of criteria established by a culture. In fact, the idea of progress in the West has been heavily criticized (for example, by Jacques Derrida). You always find a steady progress if you just decide on the right parameters to assess it. The solution to this problem is changing the rules of the question. There is no way of answering the question if it’s assessed only according to the criteria of the problem itself. So, you need to figure out what the metaphysical assumptions are that you need to subvert, and we can do this. Maybe we become cynical about it. But I still think I believe in something that Tiqqun once said in the opening essay of their first issue: politics is metaphysics, and a new politics demands a new metaphysics; we shouldn’t be ashamed of doing metaphysics just because the ideas of some Nazi metaphysician became very influential.
BaixaCultura: In dialogue with this question, you sometimes position your work in contrast with Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism and propose a manifesto for the imagination of another relationship with the end. How does your concept of anti-hauntology, I suppose, differ from his? And what does this other relationship look like in practice?
Alessandro: The original idea of anti-hauntology was developed by Matt Bluemink even before I met him. So, it’s only later that I continued what he did, obviously, again taking it as a starting ground and then building in my own direction. And we have had some disagreements on how the concepts could be applied. Regarding the difference between hauntology and anti-hauntology, this has been discussed in the debate between Matt Bluemink and Matt Colquhoun, which happened when Matt Bluemink published the first essay. Matt Colquhoun replied, and then there was a back-and-forth that happened in 2021. Matt Colquhoun criticized the idea of making this distinction between hauntology and anti-hauntology because it itself is “hauntological.” And I think that this is a very, let’s say, unfair criticism.
This criticism could be called a post-structuralist critique, that every opposition cannot be clearly established as an opposition, because every concept contains within itself its negation, and so on. This is precisely a problem that we’re going to try to overcome. What I tried to do in my book was to impose it, even doing some violence against the violence of a system which is required, and leaving philosophy behind to enter theory. You have to argue for something which you know cannot be proven to be true, but you’re trying to actualize it. There is a potentiality for the new, and you’re trying to actualize it in reality.
And then, in practice, what happens – and this is the summary of Matt Bluemink’s argument – is that you are instilling hope through culture: yes, the new can still happen, and the new, in fact, has already happened; you just need to create the metaphysical assumptions for it. There is nothing… There is something I say in the first chapter, where I say: “Today, nothing is possible because nothing is impossible.” So, this can also be reverted. I’m not saying that you create everything out of thin air, but you do change subjectivities out of thin air.
So, the practical application is very, very similar to art. I always compare it with aesthetics. Art changes reality, but it doesn’t actually change reality. It changes your worldview and opens up new possibilities. Yet, nothing is changing; everything is changing. Because the problem is a problem of subjectivity. It’s not a problem of materiality. If we think it’s a problem of materiality, it’s only because it’s a problem of subjectivity that makes us think it’s a material problem. The material problem can be overcome; it’s that we, as a collective, have lost control over reality.
BaixaCultura: Guattari, in 1993, in his book “Caosmosis,” speaks of aesthetics as a way to re-signify subjectivity in the face of sociopolitical issues. I quote him: “One cannot conceive of an international discipline in this domain without bringing a solution to the problems of world hunger and hyperinflation in the third world.” “The only acceptable finality in human activities is the production of a subjectivity that enriches the mode of continuity and its relations with the world.” So, he’s trying to say that aesthetics creates influence in this common worldview that becomes material.
My question was about another topic: the internet and digital technologies. So, do you think that the current contamination of the internet and digital technologies in our notion of aesthetics and the relationship between this and the sociopolitical fabric is a way to recreate, re-signify this channel, this worldview of the contemporary? Is art a way to achieve these changes?
Alessandro: I always think that subjectivity, to a certain extent, can be seen as an end in itself. The question is not: What kind of world do we want? Rather, what kind of future we want? In other words, we should think about subjectivity as the means to an end. But we don’t know yet, because we are not yet at the beginning. And this is something, by the way, that Baudrillard does and is criticized for it, because he never envisions how we could overcome capital or a solution. But the solution is subjectivity. Not that a new subjectivity arises and the world is immediately changed, but that the problem is a problem of potentiality. Once the potentiality is available, everything can unfold or not.
But I also think that, especially philosophy, has a certain arrogance of trying to shape the world, and this is part of the problem. Because this is what science does, what the State does, and I don’t want to engage with that. Therefore, it seems that I remain abstract, but I think in the most material sense, which is from the standpoint of subjectivity. And so, everything you said, I agree with it. In a way, perhaps the criticism is that what I’m saying is very simple. If you look at art, it’s not that art changes anything, but it makes people look at the world in a different way. It shapes the problem, and shaping the problem is part of the solution.
BaixaCultura: Yes, this was from 1993, you said before, right? It’s been forty years that have been discussing this – and it’s never-ending. Is there a way out?
Alessandro: I think the most important thing that changed is how we can activate new subjectivities faster and on a much broader scale, on a global scale. I always think about what I do in these terms: in terms of the number of outputs that I can reach all at once and how they can be immediately altered; also, how this is also dangerous for the system and can more easily produce a change, and also can more easily prevent it. This is what has changed in the last thirty years – one of the most important things, at least, that has changed.
BaixaCultura: You talk about culture, music, art. Your analysis spans from Britney Spears to K-pop and the internet. How do you connect diverse cultural objects and, in your opinion, what do they reveal about our contemporary moments?
Alessandro: I’m very interested in the connection between what in the English-speaking world we call high-brow culture and low-brow culture. And how, especially in the Anglosphere, this connection is often severed, and there is a divide between them. So there is a divide between Heidegger and Britney Spears. But I’m interested in Britney Spears, and I often think about her in a maybe hyper-intellectual way. But I don’t think that, in reality, the two things are distinct because of the structure of semio-capital. Everything is on the market at the same time, and these old-fashioned and even, let’s say, distinctions between high culture and low culture are being abolished. And I think they are being abolished by what I would refer to as “trash culture.”
If in the 19th and 20th centuries, kitsch tried to bridge the gap between working-class culture and middle-class culture, now we have trash culture. The internet, in particular, has been the technology of trash. And trash, by definition, is what destroys the distinction between the high and the low, the good and the bad, and so on… Personally, I find that reestablishing this connection, which I think is still quite, how can I say, open to various “assemblages”, is a fertile ground for new forms of imagination. Here, imagination is something I would define specifically as the reconstruction of connections between subjectivities and culture. So, I’m talking specifically about all the questions. By making a joke about Kanye West and Hegel, let’s say, you can find new ways of remaking the assemblage that makes culture and find new expressions of subjectivities. I’m being very optimistic about it. But I think it is still something that remains open for theorization and politicization.
BaixaCultura: We also wanted to ask you about the different perspectives of Mark Fisher’s generation and your generation. The perception of the end or the simulation of the apocalypse. Is it different for us? Is it interesting or is it a simulation?
Alessandro: There is a quote by Grafton Tanner, who is perhaps part of a younger generation of writers, who writes that in the 2010s, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds thought that there was a crisis of imagining the past and imagining the future. This was happening in the 2010s, but now the crisis is of imagining the present. So, I think it has become all-encompassing, and the crisis of imagination, which was somehow still partial at the time of Mark Fisher, has become widespread, and many of his affirmations have become even stronger.
But what has changed is that people can no longer ignore this. And it’s still very relevant that Mark Fisher is still the most well-known philosopher of the last twenty years. But, at the same time, I also think that the new generation – and yes, I perhaps include myself in this box – is starting to understand that the rules have been changed by the problem. I personally think that the question is about reinventing imagination, which seems like something very ambitious. But I also see that in the use of technology, which each generation is affecting, they are creating new relationships between themselves and culture and, therefore, creating new imaginaries. Which doesn’t mean new realities, new futures, new worldviews, but new practices. Also, the speed at which this is happening is increasing.
And I think that, after Mark Fisher’s death in 2017, it started accelerating beyond the control of what could have been old-fashioned late capitalism. We now live in too-late capitalism. This also means that temporality is shrinking, and immediacy is increasingly taking the lead in the relationship with capital. And this is somehow beneficial. So, even if you think about what artificial intelligence is really used for, it’s to make transactions faster. This is the main application: finding ways to make the economy run even faster than it currently is. But this is also affecting our relationship with technology, and it’s drifting away from old-fashioned biopolitical control, I think, to a certain extent, because the number of relationships, nodes, and circuits is just increasing now. Also, the potentialities are increasing. And, in general, I would say I’m more optimistic, and I don’t see much of this optimism, but I predict that it will keep increasing.
BaixaCultura: Do you have any relations with the accelerationists, Nick Land, or other thinkers of that sort? There is an article about him in Blue Labyrinths.
Alessandro: Yes, Nick Land is a strange one. I’m interested in him, let’s say, as much as someone can be interested in the Devil. Which means, the Devil really is an important cultural argument in what could have been ideal in the Middle Ages, and Nick Land is the Devil in capitalism. There is something very interesting for me in the shift that has happened in thought between the writings of Nick Land’s first phase and the second phase, in which he leaned more and more towards the right and new directions, new reactionary movements, and so on. And by studying that, I’m starting to realize that what I’ve been defining as subjectivity also brings with it a certain ethics – ethics, which is a word you never find in Semiotics of the End. But Nick Land is definitely someone who doesn’t think in terms of ethics or morals, because he thinks of capital as an anonymous inorganic agency. On the contrary, the human being as in ethical and biological “fiction” produced by capital.
But he doesn’t think – not even for one moment – that this could be part, quote unquote, of ideology, although a more correct word here would be paradigm. Anyway, he sees capital as metaphysics, but metaphysics is a paradigm, even in the scientific connotation of the term. So, it’s a paradigm shift; it’s a metaphysical revolution in the world. When the Sun is no longer at the center of the universe, the world is completely different, but nothing has really changed; when capital is no longer at the center of our relationships, everything is the same, but everything is different. So, Nick Land never considers the possibility – and I criticize him for not taking the semiotic level seriously, which means that the semiotic level is manipulable, but it can be constructed differently. So, I’m interested in it, but I think his point of view is short-sighted.
BaixaCultura: So you’re not a Satanist? If he’s the Devil…
Alessandro: I’m more like a theorist of Satanism.
BaixaCultura: Another author, Andrea Colamedici, the author behind Hypnocracy. He seems to believe that we are in a moment of fragmentation of our online presence into so many layers of online and offline presence and everything else… And he kind of points in the direction that we must learn to coexist in all those layers, like a living presence here, but also a living presence on the social network or in the WhatsApp group or in the avatar, and in all these spheres of relations.
So, how do you conceptualize fragmentation as a way to thrive in this moment of uncertainty? In the book, he tries to sell the idea that we must know that we are everywhere at the same time? For example, when he talks about it, he brings up the idea of real simulation. Today, it’s all simulated and it’s all real at the same time: this is real and your avatar is real and your Instagram is real – everything is real and, yet, is a simulation at the same time. But we cannot lose ourselves.
Alessandro: I see. I think it’s fascinating, but the scale at which these assumptions are made is a scale that, politically, is not very operational. There are different scales. So, on a microscopic scale, on the mineral scale – let’s take a computer as an example. A computer has various scales. So, on the microscopic scale, there is light passing through the cables, and on the scale of the particle, there is no politics. There’s very little you could do beyond theories about what light is and quantum physics, and so on; it’s very difficult to make a meaningful change at that level. On a higher level, there’s more or less what you’re talking about: a level of the social habitus that you assume in the interaction with the computer; this is the social scale. And I think that, although it’s a very real scale, it’s not very operational. Now, between the light on the optic fiber and the social habitus, there is a relationship. What mediates this relationship is capital, because it is capital that is paying for the cables that connect the lights; by means of it, you can see yourself on the computer and try to learn from it. Here, I’m interested in what I call the medium, according to my own interpretation: it’s about what is happening in between. Surely, what is happening in between it is very real, yet it is also what reproduces the simulation.
So, perhaps here I invert the rules: in your immediate circumstances, you can reconceptualize your relationship, and interact with the computer in a different way, and even change the type of optical fibers you use, affecting the relationship by acting from the highest level to the lowest, and viceversa. In my Semiotics of the End, I often do this kind of jump from the heights. In the chapter on information theory of the book – “Overdrive and meaning” – one of the central chapters of the book, I write about the structure of information, which is a very abstract theory, but as a political element. But there’s nothing intrinsically political in the bits of information. There’s something political only in the relationship. But if you focus just on one level…
To summarize, we could say that the interscalar element is very political, and I try to act on it. But if you only think on one scale, it can be complex. To add another thing, there is a trend in media theory, which is interesting to discuss, the pure materiality of the resources being used. For example, Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford talks about the resources, the materiality of mapping the world and so on. But she conceptualizes it as something intra-scalar. What I find interesting is the interscalar element, where she also writes about what the software is doing; she tries to connect everything, but talking from only one level. And there’s a series of actions that can be very local, while the global happens between the scales. So, that could be something I realized after writing a book, and again, you won’t find the word “scale,” but this is what happens with books: you retrospectively come up with good ideas that you didn’t write.
BaixaCultura: So, you kind of think that this vision is “tricking the machine,” isn’t it?
Alessandro: The solution must be in the relationship. But if you think about the pure materiality, and it seems that social aid is a materiality, like gestures and practices, and these things can be changed, but not on a very individual and minimal local level, I think. So, it’s just not the best way to go, I think. Living in Italy and coming from abroad, it’s been about eleven years now that I’ve been here. I have the impression that Italian culture creates a different materiality for underground culture. I’m not sure if that’s the right word. Let me follow what I wrote. Living in Italy gives me the impression that a lot of what is created in different realities in the different Italian cities remains, because there’s a kind of resistance to the system and to systematization. It’s as if the underground resists becoming mainstream for a long time. If you go to Bologna, you see shops that have been selling comics for forty years and don’t want to grow. So, you have a culture of scenes spread all over the country, and people still do them and don’t want to publish them.
BaixaCultura: So, as an Italian who has lived or lives abroad, do you see this in the same way? And if so, how does Charta engage with this dimension of non-institutionalized knowledge that keeps emerging all over Italy? Does it or not? A big advantage for you and for Charta Sporca.
Alessandro: Yes, that’s definitely part of it. And more in general about Italy, I think the question is about the economy of bodies. The capitalist economy is not a default of the economy: think for example, about an old town in Italy, for example, Trieste or Bologna. But as you approach the metropolis, even Milan, and as you go up and go to Paris, then the economy of bodies and the actual economy start to merge into each other. There’s a certain degree of hypnosis going on there.
And I think it can only be resisted as long as – it’s hard, only as long as, I’m not sure if that’s the only reason – but only as long as people are not born inside it. It’s very difficult to step back from the metropolis if that’s the only reality you’ve seen. In the same way as we go to a forest and we were not born in the forest, but we look at the forest as if the trees were made for furniture. We don’t look at the forest in a natural way. So, our view is really shaped by the artificial environment of the city, and we cannot see nature as nature. In the same way, if the metropolitan subject sees time, relationships are already in such a way that is an aberration for the city, as a form of life outside the city.
The French collective Tiqqun has a very interesting, very radical distinction between life outside the metropolis, and he says that the metropolis is unsalvageable. There’s nothing left to save from the metropolis. If anything, you should only convince the people in the metropolis to get away from it and never come back. There is no way of changing capital and the capitalist, but you can allow people to see that there is a way out, if they want it.