Prophetic Culture: Recreation For Adolescents

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Selected as one of The Tablets Books of the Year 2021 Throughout history, different civilisations have given rise to many alternative worlds. Each of them was the enactment of a unique story about the structure of reality, the rhythm of time and the range of what it is possible to think and to do in the course of a life. Cosmological stories, however, are fragile things. As soon as they lose their ring of truth and their significance for living, the worlds that they brought into existence disintegrate. New and alien worlds emerge from their ruins. Federico Campagna explores the twilight of our contemporary notion of reality, and the fading of the cosmological story that belonged to the civilisation of Westernised Modernity. How are we to face the challenge of leaving a fertile cultural legacy to those who will come after the end of our future How can we help the creation of new worlds out of the ruins of our own

Reviews

It sets a new tone - but this tone is immediately recognizable as belonging to our time. * Boris Groys, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University, USA *
A brilliant meditation on the planetary debacle of Westernized Modernity and a radical evocation of the spiritual and imaginative realities that may just possibly lie beyond the ruins of our future. A lucid and urgent work. * Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University, USA *
Its not enough to realize that the world is ending; we need to learn how to dream up new ones. Federico Campagnas Prophetic Culture a worthy successor to his Technic and Magic offers an eloquent, evocative and visionary map for drafting the cosmos to come. * John Tresch, Mellon Professor in History of Art, Science, and Folk Practice, The Warburg Institute, UK *
A world does not simply exist from a human point of view. It needs to be maintained and even entertained by means of song and story. But how to perform this maintenance, or housekeeping if time and space break down, if the present becomes unpredictable, the past keeps changing, the future is past and the house as such becomes precarious, unstable and unavailable Despite its wealth of historical references to prophetism and gnostic traditions Federico Campagna's book is in my view an intriguing experiment of how to turn something as mundane and pedestrian as housekeeping into a necessary tool of remaking the world, to turn housekeeping into world making so to speak. * Hito Steyerl, Filmmaker and writer *
This is a visionary book, highly original in conception. It offers an eloquent series of meditations on the forms of cultural and political possibility embedded within Judaeo-Christian mysticism, and addresses the prevailing sense of cultural crisis with confidence. Like Giorgio Agamben, Federico Campagna is an eclectic thinker with an internally coherent and urgent message for our time. * Malcolm Bull, Professor of Art and the History of Ideas, Christ Church College, Oxford *
Campagna has written the score for a piece that allows its own end. It dies within and in its death gives us life in form of a humble prayer. A prayer whose words we have forgotten long ago but whose rhythm we still sing to ourselves. * Nicolas Jaar, Composer *
Something has ended. What comes next is still unclear. At a time when extrapolative futures designed for navigating more stable realities are proving inadequate, Prophetic Culture offers a possible angle of approach, through a new kind of worlding, for the hazy, futureless reality fast approaching from over the imaginative horizon. * Anthony Dunne, Professor of Design and Social Inquiry, The New School, USA *
We are on the bridge between worlds: Federico Campagna shows us how we might remake the cartographies of the next. The end of the world, as seen through the prophetic attitude, becomes not apocalypse, but apocatastasis: a joyful restoration. Campagna offers the cosmic trip for our collective transformation, inadvertently becoming a prophet for our time. Prophetic Culture is the foundational book for the day after tomorrow. * Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers, Ignota Books *

Author Bio

Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London, UK. He is the author of Technic and Magic: the reconstruction of reality (2018) and The Last Night: anti-work, atheism, adventure (2013). He works as a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in the Hague, the Netherlands.