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Cultura profetica: Messaggi per i mondi a venireì
Nel corso della storia i gruppi umani che si sono susseguiti hanno creato narrazioni diverse del mondo, vivendo così in mondi differenti. Ogni narrazione cosmologica, però, giunge al il suo futuro si esaurisce e un’apocalisse la investe. Il nostro pianeta ha vissuto molte apocalissi storiche, come ciascuno di noi fa esperienza di svariate fini del mondo nel corso della propria vita.Come affrontare la sfida di lasciare un messaggio culturale fecondo a coloro che verranno dopo la fine del nostro futuro? Come possiamo contribuire alla creazione di nuovi mondi dalle rovine del nostro?Siamo davanti a un lasciare in eredità le scorie del nostro mondo distrutto e autodistruttivo, oppure una fertile bugia che ci conduca oltre la soglia della prossima apocalisse.Il profeta non conserva la cenere del mondo passato, ma immagina dei messaggi da inviare ai mondi alieni a venire.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
294 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2023
17 people are currently reading
311 people want to read
About the author
Federico Campagna
16 books179 followersFederico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London.
He is the author of 'Otherworlds: Mediterranean lessons on escaping history' (Bloomsbury, 2025), 'Prophetic Culture: recreation for adolescents' (Bloomsbury, 2021), and 'Technic and Magic: the reconstruction of reality' (Bloosmbury, 2018), ‘The Last Night: antiwork, atheism, adventure’, (Zero Books, 2013).
He is lecturer in World-building at The Architectural Association (London), Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute (London), and lecturer in Intellectual History at ECAL (Lausanne).
He works as director of rights at the UK/US radical publisher Verso Books, as editorial consultant for philosophy and anthropology at the Italian publisher Einaudi, and is a co-founder and senior editor at the Italian philosophy publisher Timeo.
He is the author of 'Otherworlds: Mediterranean lessons on escaping history' (Bloomsbury, 2025), 'Prophetic Culture: recreation for adolescents' (Bloomsbury, 2021), and 'Technic and Magic: the reconstruction of reality' (Bloosmbury, 2018), ‘The Last Night: antiwork, atheism, adventure’, (Zero Books, 2013).
He is lecturer in World-building at The Architectural Association (London), Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute (London), and lecturer in Intellectual History at ECAL (Lausanne).
He works as director of rights at the UK/US radical publisher Verso Books, as editorial consultant for philosophy and anthropology at the Italian publisher Einaudi, and is a co-founder and senior editor at the Italian philosophy publisher Timeo.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 28, 2024
Another delightful read from Federico Campagna. The question here is: given the imminent demise of Western modernity, what cultural artefact might we be able to design that 1) could find its way through the wormhole of collapse and transition to be embedded in the cultural matrix of an unknown civilisation yet to come, and 2) would dissimulate, dismantle or erase the code of self-destruction built into modernity. The question is, of course, highly speculative. We don't know what kind of civilisation will emerge from the rubble. However, Campagna hypothesises, we can know something about the psychology of such transitional entities. They are very likely to have a disposition similar to that of a human adolescent. In general, adolescents have a very ambivalent attitude towards order. On the one hand, they crave order to give shape to their unsettled lives; on the other, they intuitively resent the narrowing of their life's possibilities that any choice of order may bring. It's different with children and adults: children crave order at every turn in their floating world, adults have been incrusted by order and desperately want to escape it.
Campagna conceives of the cultural probe to reach beyond our future as a 'tetrapharmakon':
I have defined this type of cultural message as a 'pharmakon' (medicine and poison), since it aims to act both as the enhancer of a new cosmogony and as an antidote to the fear and embarrassment of adolescent subjectivities. Tetrapharmakon (the four-folded pharmakon) is a term that I borrow from the Epicurean tradition, which identified in four principles the best possible cure to the anxiety and dread of finding oneself existing in a death-bound world of becoming. Similar to the Epicurean remedy, this pharmakon is made up of four different elements and it is designed to tackle the existential paralysis that often accompanies a post-apocalyptic subject (...) Each of them describes, not so much a concept, but an attitude towards the activity of world-building. This tetrapharmakon is a collection of four figures who have been and can still be inhabited by anyone willing to artfully intervene on their perspective towards worlding. They are: the metaphysician, the shaman, the mystic and the prophet."
Campagna goes on to discuss the worlding ethos of each of these figures in turn, (unfortunately) giving relatively short shrift to the first three, but devoting a lengthy section of the book to the prophetic element that, in a way, subsumes and activates the potential of the others.
Today's world is in the grip of the metaphysician, a figure that "chains disorder and intensifies order to paroxysm (...) Metaphysical order develops into paranoia raised to the status of organizing principle for the whole of reality. Metaphysical disorder, by the same token, is reduced to being mere ‘complexity’, that is, a challenge that has inscribed within itself metaphysics’ ability to resolve it."
The shaman provides a counterweight here. A marginal disposition in our world its "approach to worlding develops on the assumption that reality is fundamentally a continuous field, binding all things together without confusing them. The reality narrated by the shaman takes the shape of a long, labyrinthine tunnel traversing every existent. From a shamanic perspective, each ‘thing’ is only partly a single and autonomous entity, and only temporarily so: anything can turn into everything, at least potentially. Movement – rather than metaphysical presence – is the principle controlling the existent."
The mystic transcends "the dichotomy between order and disorder. If the cosmology of a metaphysician decrees that things in the world are ‘either this or that’, and if the shaman claims that everything can be in fact ‘both this and that’, the solution adopted by the mystic revolves around the notion of ‘neither nor’. (...) Mysticism gives rise to no world, but it signs a truce between all parties involved in the struggle to impose order over disorder. Taken by itself, the herb of the mystic makes its user eventually forget the world, and thus also the aesthetic imperative of allowing new world-creations."
Campagna then approaches the prophetic from different vantage points. It is difficult to synthetically fixate because of its syncretic, synoptic, untimely, layered and meta-meta character. It touches on the furthermost limits of our imagination.
"Prophetic culture aims to create, not single works, but entire landscapes where the cosmogonic imagination of a subject can fully unfold (...) A prophet is a place where prophecy can make itself manifest."
There is something impersonal about the prophetic in that it abolishes both authorship and audience as constitutive of the information transfer encoded by the prophetic message. The relationship of the audience vis-à-vis the prophetic clearing "is closer to the process of existential transformation defined in Orthodox Christianity as theosis (becoming-divine, as a return of the subject’s awareness to the otherworldly realm) (...) To engage with prophetic culture is an ‘exercise’ (askesis) involving a subject’s fundamental imagination about the stuff that makes up reality. It is an active work, in that it requires a modification of one’s own cosmological parameters – but it is also an exercise of non-activity (wei wu wei, ‘action-non-action’ in Taoist literature), where one observes the new reality that begins to surface in front of their own eyes."
Campagna's excursion into the prophetic is tantalisingly complex, riddled with theological and hermetic references. But it always remains a pleasure to read and it was with relish that I followed him in the rabbit holes of the grotesque, memory palaces and apocatastasis. Eventually it becomes clear why the prophetic could help the tetrapharmakon to be embedded in the bloodstream of a future civilisation:
"Rather than promoting apathy and fatalism, a prophetic gaze offers that reassurance against the anguish of loss and of becoming, which is by necessity the foundation of any meaningful action. Indeed, the suffering of the world comes nearest to the place occupied by the prophet. And there is a close proximity between the impulse towards suicide and the impulse to prophesize. Taking up a prophetic approach towards reality kills a part of the subject, making them somewhat dead to the world. Likewise, the suicidal epiphany of seeing oneself as an unnecessary convention of language is already a recognition of an other realm (even just ‘non-being’) where one is reintegrated, once they abandon the world. Yet, this proximity to the utterly un-worldly doesn’t make prophetic culture a hymn to self-annihilation. Prophecy and suicide share a similar cosmological outlook, but they have different programmes of action. They wish to soothe suffering in opposite ways. While suicide attempts to throw a person’s body outside the world, prophecy reminds them that they are always-already part of realms exceeding the world – that they have always-already fled, that they have already been saved. Seen as one island surrounded by other spaces, the world itself turns, from a serious game, into a game that can be played seriously. It has its own unbreakable inner rules, and its lure and threats can often feel overwhelming, yet it is just a process taking place within a specific board. Even if one wished to end their act before its natural closure, they wouldn’t have to do so with acrimony – rather, like players gracefully abandoning the table."
In the final section of the book Campagna shifts to a very different register. In some sort of daring, unworldly allegory of exploration and discovery he tries to give us a visual, paradoxical flavour of the components of the pharmakon. The epilogue by Franco Berardi Bifo was a bit of a letdown. I recommend to study the notes sections after each chapter as an important source of pointers to further reading.
Altogether a very intriguing and mesmerising sequel to Campagna's forays into metaphysical world-building in his Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality.
Campagna conceives of the cultural probe to reach beyond our future as a 'tetrapharmakon':
I have defined this type of cultural message as a 'pharmakon' (medicine and poison), since it aims to act both as the enhancer of a new cosmogony and as an antidote to the fear and embarrassment of adolescent subjectivities. Tetrapharmakon (the four-folded pharmakon) is a term that I borrow from the Epicurean tradition, which identified in four principles the best possible cure to the anxiety and dread of finding oneself existing in a death-bound world of becoming. Similar to the Epicurean remedy, this pharmakon is made up of four different elements and it is designed to tackle the existential paralysis that often accompanies a post-apocalyptic subject (...) Each of them describes, not so much a concept, but an attitude towards the activity of world-building. This tetrapharmakon is a collection of four figures who have been and can still be inhabited by anyone willing to artfully intervene on their perspective towards worlding. They are: the metaphysician, the shaman, the mystic and the prophet."
Campagna goes on to discuss the worlding ethos of each of these figures in turn, (unfortunately) giving relatively short shrift to the first three, but devoting a lengthy section of the book to the prophetic element that, in a way, subsumes and activates the potential of the others.
Today's world is in the grip of the metaphysician, a figure that "chains disorder and intensifies order to paroxysm (...) Metaphysical order develops into paranoia raised to the status of organizing principle for the whole of reality. Metaphysical disorder, by the same token, is reduced to being mere ‘complexity’, that is, a challenge that has inscribed within itself metaphysics’ ability to resolve it."
The shaman provides a counterweight here. A marginal disposition in our world its "approach to worlding develops on the assumption that reality is fundamentally a continuous field, binding all things together without confusing them. The reality narrated by the shaman takes the shape of a long, labyrinthine tunnel traversing every existent. From a shamanic perspective, each ‘thing’ is only partly a single and autonomous entity, and only temporarily so: anything can turn into everything, at least potentially. Movement – rather than metaphysical presence – is the principle controlling the existent."
The mystic transcends "the dichotomy between order and disorder. If the cosmology of a metaphysician decrees that things in the world are ‘either this or that’, and if the shaman claims that everything can be in fact ‘both this and that’, the solution adopted by the mystic revolves around the notion of ‘neither nor’. (...) Mysticism gives rise to no world, but it signs a truce between all parties involved in the struggle to impose order over disorder. Taken by itself, the herb of the mystic makes its user eventually forget the world, and thus also the aesthetic imperative of allowing new world-creations."
Campagna then approaches the prophetic from different vantage points. It is difficult to synthetically fixate because of its syncretic, synoptic, untimely, layered and meta-meta character. It touches on the furthermost limits of our imagination.
"Prophetic culture aims to create, not single works, but entire landscapes where the cosmogonic imagination of a subject can fully unfold (...) A prophet is a place where prophecy can make itself manifest."
There is something impersonal about the prophetic in that it abolishes both authorship and audience as constitutive of the information transfer encoded by the prophetic message. The relationship of the audience vis-à-vis the prophetic clearing "is closer to the process of existential transformation defined in Orthodox Christianity as theosis (becoming-divine, as a return of the subject’s awareness to the otherworldly realm) (...) To engage with prophetic culture is an ‘exercise’ (askesis) involving a subject’s fundamental imagination about the stuff that makes up reality. It is an active work, in that it requires a modification of one’s own cosmological parameters – but it is also an exercise of non-activity (wei wu wei, ‘action-non-action’ in Taoist literature), where one observes the new reality that begins to surface in front of their own eyes."
Campagna's excursion into the prophetic is tantalisingly complex, riddled with theological and hermetic references. But it always remains a pleasure to read and it was with relish that I followed him in the rabbit holes of the grotesque, memory palaces and apocatastasis. Eventually it becomes clear why the prophetic could help the tetrapharmakon to be embedded in the bloodstream of a future civilisation:
"Rather than promoting apathy and fatalism, a prophetic gaze offers that reassurance against the anguish of loss and of becoming, which is by necessity the foundation of any meaningful action. Indeed, the suffering of the world comes nearest to the place occupied by the prophet. And there is a close proximity between the impulse towards suicide and the impulse to prophesize. Taking up a prophetic approach towards reality kills a part of the subject, making them somewhat dead to the world. Likewise, the suicidal epiphany of seeing oneself as an unnecessary convention of language is already a recognition of an other realm (even just ‘non-being’) where one is reintegrated, once they abandon the world. Yet, this proximity to the utterly un-worldly doesn’t make prophetic culture a hymn to self-annihilation. Prophecy and suicide share a similar cosmological outlook, but they have different programmes of action. They wish to soothe suffering in opposite ways. While suicide attempts to throw a person’s body outside the world, prophecy reminds them that they are always-already part of realms exceeding the world – that they have always-already fled, that they have already been saved. Seen as one island surrounded by other spaces, the world itself turns, from a serious game, into a game that can be played seriously. It has its own unbreakable inner rules, and its lure and threats can often feel overwhelming, yet it is just a process taking place within a specific board. Even if one wished to end their act before its natural closure, they wouldn’t have to do so with acrimony – rather, like players gracefully abandoning the table."
In the final section of the book Campagna shifts to a very different register. In some sort of daring, unworldly allegory of exploration and discovery he tries to give us a visual, paradoxical flavour of the components of the pharmakon. The epilogue by Franco Berardi Bifo was a bit of a letdown. I recommend to study the notes sections after each chapter as an important source of pointers to further reading.
Altogether a very intriguing and mesmerising sequel to Campagna's forays into metaphysical world-building in his Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality.
May 29, 2025
This is a book in which I will probably wrestle with the ideas in it long after having read it. Campagna writes with much passion even when he gets his most abstract. The book is heavily peppered with in-depth footnotes for those that really want to get lost in the weeds. A nice little afterward by Franco Berardi that helps outline some interesting links between the two thinkers' intellectual interests.
February 1, 2024
Cosa resterà della nostra civiltà? Nulla, forse. O meglio, qualcosa potremmo lasciare alle civiltà del futuro se adottassimo la cultura profetica. L'autore ci accompagna in un percorso non semplice ma affascinante, tra worlding, fine di civiltà, metafisica, sciamanesimo, misticismo e profezia, avventurandosi nella teologia per poi proporre una nuova prospettiva - la cultura profetica, appunto - al nostro mondo occidentalizzato ormai al tramonto. Il profeta infatti non prevede il futuro ma vede il presente, ed è in una posizione tale - dentro e fuori la storia, e su tanti piani, immagini e stili diversi - che permette sia di "inventare un passato migliore per chi verrà dopo la fine del nostro futuro, sia [di] regalare a noi stessi un altro presente in cui poter vivere adesso". Insomma, forse abbiamo un'ultima chance di salvezza e un nuovo inizio.
"L'insurrezione permanente della cultura profetica si scaglia contro due avversari: contro la forza tirannica di un mondo che imprigiona i propri abitanti dentro le frontiere della propria grammatica, e contro la presenza terrificante di un abisso di insensatezza che sempre scorre al di sotto di ogni mondo".
"L'insurrezione permanente della cultura profetica si scaglia contro due avversari: contro la forza tirannica di un mondo che imprigiona i propri abitanti dentro le frontiere della propria grammatica, e contro la presenza terrificante di un abisso di insensatezza che sempre scorre al di sotto di ogni mondo".
October 27, 2022
Interesting book where post-anarquic thinking embraces misticism, shamanism and prophetic cultures.
Anyway I would suggest to read another Campagna's book first: Technic and Magic.
I think that the exposition and aim is clearer and more profound in that book.
Sadly, as is the case of authors like Saul Newman and Bifo Berardi (two different political writers), they are not read by those who urgently need to learn the lesson provided by them: left-winged individuals who aspire to do a revolution without taking a deep look on themselves and their metaphysical grounds.
Anyway I would suggest to read another Campagna's book first: Technic and Magic.
I think that the exposition and aim is clearer and more profound in that book.
Sadly, as is the case of authors like Saul Newman and Bifo Berardi (two different political writers), they are not read by those who urgently need to learn the lesson provided by them: left-winged individuals who aspire to do a revolution without taking a deep look on themselves and their metaphysical grounds.
Read
February 17, 2024no star rating because it's weird to rate philosophy because that implies i agree with the thoughts as equal to the amount of stars i rated it. anyways this was pretty good and inspiring for me. I generously skimmed this one, and definitely got lost during the prophecy chapters and everything about the metaphysical/shaman/mystics. But the rest was pretty clear and understandable. I feel enriched from reading this and it meshes well with my general existence so i'm glad I found something that puts words to ideas I was having while also expanding into territories I didn't realize they could go
March 1, 2022
Пока что лучшая книга года. Ощущение, что я погрузился во вневременной кратер.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews