Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality

by Federico Campagna

We take for granted that only certain kind of things exist – electrons but not angels, passports but not nymphs. This is what we understand as 'reality'. But in fact, 'reality' varies with each era of the world, in turn shaping the field of what is possible to do, think and imagine. Our contemporary age has embraced a troubling and painful form of Technic. Under Technic, the foundations of reality begin to crumble, shrinking the field of the possible and freezing our lives in an anguished state of paralysis. Technic and Magic shows that the way out of the present deadlock lies much deeper than debates on politics or economics. By drawing from an array of Northern and Southern sources – spanning from Heidegger, Junger and Stirner's philosophies, through Pessoa's poetry, to Advaita Vedanta, Bhartrhari, Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra's theosophies – Magic is presented as an alternative system of reality to Technic. While Technic attempts to capture the world through an 'absolute language', Magic centres its reconstruction of the world around the notion of the 'ineffable' that lies at the heart of existence. Technic and Magic is an original philosophical work, and a timely cultural intervention. It disturbs our understanding of the structure of reality, while restoring it in a new form. This is possibly the most radical if we wish to change our world, first we have to change the idea of 'reality' that defines it.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Magick, Technology, Essays, Spirituality, Magic

322 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 31, 2018

About the author

Federico 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.

Reviews

[Forrest · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had high expectations for Technic and Magic, since it had come so strongly recommended by my favorite podcast Weird Studies. I was excited for the prospects the book held, but I must admit that, at first, the setup felt a little . . . pedantic? For some reason, the Ralph Bakshi animated movie Wizards seemed appropriate to the opening salvoes of Campagna's analysis. And while I do love that movie, I did not want to simply read a book that was a rehash of the overly-simplistic "technology bad, magic good" argument. Also, I am often suspicious of works that explicitly or implicitly identify themselves as Marxist or Neo-Marxist critique, mainly because these forms can so often be idealized and lacking nuance. But in this case, I can see the utility of these arguments because of the natural mapping of scientific to economic power structures and people's blind faith in those structures. Honestly, I felt the book was largely apolitical, or at least dismissive of both liberal and conservative attempts to subsume interpretations of "reality" under their respective rubrics. Not directly dismissive, but passive, really. I honestly didn't feel like Campagna was concerned with politics here. Or at least, he barely nodded in that direction. This is a book about an individual's view of and participation in "reality". If anything, it's a touch anarchic.

Campagna's outline and explanation of the basic structure of Technic's version of reality felt well-reasoned and organized. Of course, that's easier when one realizes that Technic's overarching "power" comes from the use of linguistic strictures as a way of describing and categorizing . . . well, everything. The logical extreme of the argument is that "if it can't be explained in words, it's not real". I'll leave it at that, but there Campagna does an excellent job of breaking down how this "power" (this is my word, not his) radiates out to encompass all aspects of the way we think about reality. And before you go asking "what is reality," I'm not going to go over it, as Campagna takes an entire chapter to describe in detail what he means, and I'm not about to transcribe an entire chapter of a philosophical work. He wrote the chapter so I don't have to. Sorry / not sorry.

i worried that the second half of the book would not provide some practical examples of alternative paradigms that can provide some kind of escape from the Technic-al world. Without this, this text becomes sheer nihilism, with an especial emphasis on how we are trapped en masse. If one were to finish the book halfway through, the end result would likely be deep depression. Campagna laid out the skeletal structure of the "Magic" reality system, and I was skeptical if he could clothe those bones with flesh (the unsubtle reference to Ezekiel is intentional, by the way).

The arguments on the Magic side seemed a little more subtle, a little less cogent than the arguments about the structure of Technic. Can we think / work our way into a Magic reality? Can we even picture, clearly, what a world outside of Technic would look like? I hoped so, but I had my doubts that Campagna could effectively lead the way.

The main reason for my distrust while reading the second half of the book was that the biggest weakness of Campagna's book was a lack of examples. Perhaps he felt that pulling discrete data out of context was too "Technic" of a move, but a couple of case-studies would have gone a long way in more fully understanding the theory that is the kernel and the whole of his "Magic" proposal.

However, in the last chapter, through the use of "Secret," "Initiation," and the "As If" motif, Campagna gives some hints (though not outright instruction) as to how one can begin to implement Magic reality while living in a Technic world. This saves the book from the pile of pseudo-philosophical texts that present all the problems, but provide no solutions; or, at best, they present the need for "further exploration". But this is not what I came here to seek. Thankfully, Campagna does provide some starting points for a new way of thinking, a magic way of thinking.

It must be said that "Magic" here is not about illusion, but there is a strong element of the trickster throughout this last section. It is more, however, about tapping into the ineffable in the way that only you, as a "self" can. This is strongly opposed to the Technic view of the individual as a cog in the machine of ever-more efficient production and becoming. It is about Being, not Becoming.

Campagna ends on a hopeful note, albeit an open-ended note. As with all difficult texts, the reader is left to ponder what is presented and start on the path to reaching their own conclusions.

I think this book is necessary. It's not a utopian piece, at least not on the societal level. In fact, Campagna makes it clear that Magic is just one more way to contextualize reality beyond that of Technic. And while he doesn't, alas, provide any other concrete examples, he has shown a way (though not the way) to reconstruct reality, along with a roadmap or intellectual structure of how one might find their own way. He's taught us, as it were, how to fish. It's up to us to outfit ourselves and find the best places to drop our nets.

[/d. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Campagna sees the modern world as riddled by several socio-psychological and socio-environmental pathologies, including widespread depression and anxiety, suicides, an overall sense of meaninglessness and disortientation, but also climate change and environmental degradation. Looking at the aggregate of these issues, Campagna asks: how come we see all of these issues in the world and how come it seems to be so hard to do anything about it.

This is a loooong review and contains a lot of "spoilers."

Fundamentally, Campagna argues that the common root to all of these issues is to be found not - as popular opinion would have it - in the specificities of our capitalist economy or even in a particular school of thought, but instead much deeper in the realm of what he terms the prevailing "reality-system." To the contrary, Campagna argues that capitalism and climate change are the logical outcomes of Technic's reality-system.
Campagna defines reality as

the name that we assign to a state in which the dimension of essence (what something is) and the dimension of existence (that something is) are inextricably bound to each other, without emerging into one another (original emphasis, see p.17)

Put differently, reality can therefore be defined as the continuum between ineffability and language, which are also the two terms that form the cornerstones of Technic and Magic in that they can be considered to be the latter's foundational principles: the reality-system of Technic grows out of the principle of Absolute Language, while the (alternative) reality-system Magic is based on the foundational principle of Ineffability.

Technic is the reality system that grows out of an over-reliance on the power of language which attempts to reduce the complex reality of a given "thing" into its potential to be activated as a productive unit within a series of a given set of circumstances. What sounds abstract at first, becomes much clearer by way of an example. A human being is a living entity whose individuality and hyper-complexity should in theory exceed the possilibity to be captured by language. Yet that's exactly what Absolute Language does. It says: You, Michael, are a worker. You are a student. You like animals. you are interested in curling. You are a father of three, divorced, remarried, currently unemployed, well-off,... etc. Absolute Language does not see you. It sees your potential to be someone or something, within the linguistic "series" of a given set of circumstances, as in: you could be an employee at the local hardware retailer.

Roughly speaking, Campagna argues that Absolute Language attempts to quantify the complexity of reality by (1) arguing that Language can be absolute; (2) everything can be measured; (3) something measured becomes a unit; (4) a given unit within a given set of circumstances becomes a "abstract general unit" (for example "a worker"); and (5) the process of quantification can never be complete since there is something (life) that stubbornly resists. Therefore Technic says: in order for everything to move forward, all of life is to be considered a vulnerability, something in the making, something incomplete, unstable, that can be fixed by way of its potential being "activated."

Technic is therefore the language of reductionism. You're nothing more than the Abstract General Entity (AGE) and often times not even that. Oftentimes we look at ourselves or others not so much as what we truly are but rather at the potential of who or what we could be. But you never are anything. You always ever could be something or someone. As an example, Campagna writes:

We seem to have bcome nothing else but workers, because in Technic's cosmology we are nothing but work. (p.87)

But there is a rather dystopian spin to this view of the world:

Within Technic's cosmogony, any existent [...] is reduced to the number of activations which it can simultaneously operate [worker, wife, pregnant, etc.] - the greater their number, and the more inducing to further activations in the interest of expanding each series, the more legitimate its presence in the world. Thus, a human being is all the more legitimate in his/her presence within the world, the more s/he is able to be the simultaneous activator of several positions at once in various different series. (p.83)

Put differently, my activations "constitute me" - "I can claim my individuality only as an AGE" (p.85).

What's important to take away from this argument is that the base assumption of Technic holds it that anything that exists can be described in precise and absolute terms. Or put differently, that which cannot be captured by language doesn't exist. Unless you "make sense" by being a functioning unit in as many "series" as possible, you simply do not exist - in the sense that the logical of Technic's reality system simply denies your existence. And this is, of course where Campagna's argument concerning mental illness and other pathologies comes into play. Since we, ourselves, know that we are so much more than the reductive pattern of our activations, we feel that something is off because part of our humanity, part of our identity and our being is denied. We cannot be who we truly are and never see anybody or anything else what he or she truly is, because all we ever see are the AGEs, the activations, the potentials:
Such strict policing of the borders of presence, and the ultimate punishment inflicted onto anything that still hols on to its irreducibility to absolute language, accounts for the devastating consequences that such a regime has on the lives of those hundreds of millions who currently live under Technic's direct domain. (p.43)
It is also the reason why any attempt to change a system - such as capitalism - within the reality-system of Technic is doomed to failure, since all social and political systems are ultimately the logical outcomes of their underlaying logic and base assumptions.

Along comes Magic. Campagna's conceptionalization of Magic came A LOT easier to me than Technic. You will notice how the language shifts between the first and the second half of the book. Maybe that's a truism. Talk about Technic maybe necessarily needs to be hyper technical. Either way, things become more intuitive and the reading a lot more pleasant (another case in point of Magic being the remedy?). Since my review is already mega long, I'll use Campagna's own words to quickly sum up the idea behind Magic:

Magic's cosmogonic process originates precisly from that dimension of existence which can never be reduced to any linguistic qualification. In the perspective of Technic, we identified this dimension as that 'something' whose resistance to annihilation gave rise to the symptoms of pain. (p.118)

Whereas Technic's 'possibility' attempts to relieve its own weight through an endless extension of its limits - hence its lust for infinite growth - Magic's 'paradox' seeks to resolve this issue through intensive harmony. (p.172)

If 'life' is the ineffable at the heart of existence, then the two fundamental questions, 'who am I?' and 'what is this?', can be answered through the same kind of apprehension. In both cases, it is a type of apprehension that is non-discursive, non-conceptual and non-propositional: it is a form of 'knowledge by presence,' in which the knower, the known and the process of knowing become one and the same thing. (p.206)

And, most beautifully, and perhaps the sentence for which alone Campagna to my mind deserves a full 5*:

If I can truly know only what I am, then my getting to truly know something ineviably means my getting to become that something. I can know the ineffable that is life (thus, also my 'individual' life), only by recognizing that fundamentally I am that ineffable. This is not so much an expansion of my knowledge, but an expansion of my existence. Achieving it means symbolically 'dying' to one's old form of existence - in which we coincided completely with the serial units of descriptive language. (p.207)

___________________

I went into a lot of detail here but that's because (particularly in the part about Technic) Campagna uses an awfully complicated language to get his points across. There are times where his writing is so technical that I simply felt lost:

We could try to sum up its paradoxical nature by defining it as a case of Double Affirmation, a 'yes-yes'. The first yes, stands for its available level of presence, that allows for its possibility and its inclusion in Technic. the second yes, clearly redundant and bewilderingly paradoxical, hints at its ultra-metaphysical ultra-presence, which is so intense that it escapes presnce and thus capture.

I mean, I know what almost all of those words means (apart from maybe ultra-presence), but I simply don't get what Campagna is driving at here. There are a couple of sentences like this, scattered throughout the book, but my advice would be to not get too stuck on them and just keep reading. Campagna repeats himself a fair bit and things will make sense in the long run.
Another criticism I have, centers around Campagna's propensity to excessively "couch" his ideas in a somewhat redundant "meta-talk":

Let us now be more specific about the meaning that we attribute to terms such as reality, existence and essence. We could begin this exploration by exhaustively mapping the complex ramifications of the centuries-old philosophical diatribes around this semantic triad. (p.103)

I read this and thought: mate, you have a good definition of "reality" and "existence". Just give it to me and cut the empty fetishization of complex words, because to my mind the second sentence is simply not adding anything of value here.


Bottomline

Phewww that was quite a ride, thanks for sticking around.

There is A LOT to be said about this book and I feel like I really only barely scratched the surface - a good sign, if you're asking me!
Campagna doesn't necessarily say anything entirely new in itself here - most of the ideas mentioned in the book have been discussed for a pretty long time now, be it the rule of Technic in the modern world or the sphere of Magic permeating everything (I particularly enjoyed the heavy reliance of source material outside the usual Western and Far Eastern philosophical works). But Campagna displays a rare form of understanding of the matter that reaches deeper than most other authors that I have read on the topic. Sometimes people speak or write in a way that just sounds true to us. We feel it reverberate within us, somehow, and that's the feeling I got when reading Technic and Magic. At times it's a tough read. In an ideal world Campagna had spent some more time fleshing out unnecessary and confusing words and sentences and maybe even simplified the language in some parts. But ultimately this is a phenomenal book whose main ideas will remain with me for a very long time. If you're ready to put up with some rather advanced language, give this book a shot, I have a hard time imagining you would regret it. Despite some of the "negative" things mentioned above, this is a full 5 stars and truly a book to be re-read and consulted in the future.
I'll close with my favorite sentence of the book:

The person initiated yo Magic's reality is at the same time the galaxy of their names and complete silence.

[Julian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that not only articulated uncertainties and anxieties I have to the present, but systematized and framed them so clearly and to such an extent that I could actually do something about it.

I really urge anyone who feels the need to justify their practice (be it art, design or whatever) to themselves or to the wider world to read this book. With reality as a frame that allows (or disallows) the things within it a legitimate existence, our present reality, the "Technic", imposes a particular suffocating character to the things that are allowed to exist. Federico, with the help of many before him, systematically disassembles our current reality framework and in doing so not only clarifies the dangers present, but in his speculative "Magic", presents an alternative that is not only viable, but immediately so.

It is difficult to put into words (impossible maybe) what influence this book has had on my outlook, I haven't come across anything like it. It goes without saying I highly recommend it.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

At night when I can’t sleep, I imagine that I’m Avicenna’s floating man. I take away all my sense-experiences and then think as if I’ve never had any perceptions of the outside world. It’s a form of meditation for me and it usually leads to a feeling of nothingness and relaxes my mind and allows me to sleep. I almost never have insomnia and that technique keeps my thoughts at bay and helps me fall back to sleep. Avicenna gives the floating man a soul and thus innate mystical knowledge for self-awareness and an inherent language for interpretation. I think that’s a mistake and I tend towards Hegel’s way of thinking, that without another or sense-experiences there is no self-awareness of the self.

Compagna makes Avicenna floating man central to his thesis. For him, it’s important that the floating man has a soul and a sense of self with language for interpretation that becomes beyond mythical, he cites Volume II of Cassirer’s “The Philosophy of the Symbolic,” and note that Cassirer makes form preceding content.

Also, Compagna correctly connected the floating man to Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, but recall for Descartes to get there he assumed the world away and made thinking necessarily equivalent to being. Compagna endorses magic by making it foundational to thought by having form precede content for understanding reality. Gadamer, the last of the phenomenologists in his book “Truth and Method” says that ‘all understanding is interpretation, and being that can be understood is language,” and when one starts with language as magical it will become the viewpoint for reality and become by default the foundation for being.

Compagna wants to return magic back into the world since he would say that magic is necessary for poetry while technic will guide reason and for him the best perspectives need intuitions, feelings, and fanciful creativity.

Junger, Spengler, and Heidegger each are cited multiple times in this book and they would argue for man’s nature should be returned to its will to power and for a returning away from using man and nature’s resources as only tools or instruments. I want to note that Compagna mentioned that Junger’s book “The Worker: Dominion and Form” does not advocate for that, but as the author notes Junger later works wants to separate man from technic. Heidegger after “Being and Time” and his Nazi phase rejects man as technic and returns to magic and poetry as fundamental. Spengler contributes mightily to the creation of Nazism and walks away from it as best as he can yet wants a return to magic rather than reason by appealing to intuitions, feelings, and fanciful creativity proceeding understanding. Fascism at its heart needs magical thinking with feelings directed by a manipulator that reflects the mobs most baser instincts.

Compagna doesn’t use the Heideggerian expression “ontological difference,” but that’s what he is trying to resolve. Magic is a dangerous way to resolve the difference between the within us and the outside of us. It can too readily be misappropriated by pseudoscience. I just read a book last week by Richard Tarnas (he’s a quack) “Cosmos and Psyche,” but the first chapter in that book was quite good, and it gets at what this book is trying to get at too. Tarnas resolved the ontological difference with Jungian archetypal astrology with synchronicity, see why I referred to Tarnas as a quack! Compagna also flirts with and defends Jungian archetypes and Freudian mumbo jumbo, but it was only on the edges and didn’t bother me.

Magic allows for opening the gates to anyone’s feelings and will lead to false views of authentic realities. Reason with all its faults will at least protect us from fraudsters manipulating us through fanciful alternative realities, pseudoscience, or just plain old lies.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the fundamental books to live in the modern society choosing an alternative view of the world straying from the one that want us to capitalize every aspect of our life. It's hard to describe the importance of this book in a few sentences, just go read it

[Valentín Serrano García · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting and enlightened reading.

The author has fanthomed technic's ontology in a quite canny fashion and offers an anarquic "magic" solution for all those who have been defeated by history.
Drawing from a diversity of peculiar sources (very imaginative, indeed), mixing islamic philosophy, alchemy, religion, hellenistic thought and much more, the author weaves a metaphoric consolation.

If you are acquainted with philosophy of technics, existentialist and phenomenologist thought, poetry and non-european thought, you will enjoy it very much. If you lack experience with those fields the journey, although uncanny sometimes will worth. If you are just devoted to analytic thinking, try hard to sink within a different experience.

Also, if you feel empathic towards anarquism, this is your book. While if you tend towards liberalismus or marxism you NEED to counterweight those perspectives with authors like Federico Campagna

[Finn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cherish this text as it re-introduced me to the ineffable as life. It’s magical and spiritual and made me feel interconnected with Life historically and into the future. I feel more inspired in a transient existence rather than mulling through an essence of being. I at least hold onto the context in which Technic dominates contemporary life while being able to submit to the hope of magic as a counter-balance system of reality.

[Juuso]

Magic and Technic deserves merit especially for a superbly interesting selection of combination of different sources, and for an aesthetically geometric structure in the organization of the book. Also, there is a sense of existential authenticity, that the book is also a deeply personal quest to try to solve certain problems of the meaning crisis of the modern age. As a piece of literature and art this book is excellent: well written and original. As a work of philosophy I found more value in it’s value for stimulating thinking and work of synthetizing various thinkers in interesting way, rather than clarity or accuracy of the arguments. Dense and abstract are first adjectives that come to mind to describe this book.

The main argument of the book is to contrast together two very different sets of assumptions and views on ontology and epistemology, namely Technic and Magic. Campagna calls these kinds of ways to see the reality ‘reality-systems’. In general, he claims, that different reality-systems pop out in different cultures throughout history. Interesting point he makes is that the reality-systems always have to balance in the space made between pure essence (reducing all things and experiences to linguistic categories) and pure existence (way of seeing and experiencing the world as non-linguistic, non-categorical being). And the problem with Technic – the present hegemonic reality-system of our age – is that it is reducing the whole of life and reality to essentialistic linguistic categories. Magic, on the other hand, is a way of viewing reality which gives a central position to ineffable dimensions of life and existence.

The book is a quite interesting intellectual journey within this kind of philosophical scheme. The first two chapters are a tour through various thinkers of modern age, who Campagna sees as either exemplifying or helping us to make sense about the Technic (which, as I understand it, is more a kind of partly unconscious Weltanschauung, not explicit philosophy of any certain thinker). Second chapter is a cosmogony of Technic, laying out a kind of abstract unfolding of this reality system, utilizing neoplatonic theology of emanations from a root principle and the succeeding hypostases (bit surprisingly, as one would not immediately guess that this would be the conceptual structure of choice to analyze reality-systems). The last two chapters mirror earlier chapters and present the alternative reality-system of Magic, deriving from a group of thinkers spanning from neoplatonic and Islamic mystics like Ibn Arabi, Mulla Sadra and Suhrawardi to moderns like Heidegger, Eliade, Jung, Jünger and Stirner, also including a bunch of ignored and fringe names (at least from my point of view), including Indian philosopher of language Bhartrhari, poet Fernando Pessoa, symbolist philosopher Ernst Cassirer, post-kantian Hans Vaihinger and a variety of others.

Just as a panorama of various neglected thinkers this book is a nice read. The book was full of clear, short summaries of central ideas of various thinkers, alternating with the development of the argument Campagna is making. The broad and varying nature of the source material ranging from ancient neoplatonic philosophical treatises to mystical branches of Islamic philosophy to modern continental poet’s and social theorists was truly exceptional. Campagna presents his source materials very elegantly. Applauds for a quite coherent integration of all these sources, and for a quite clear distinction between what is Campagna’s voice and what is somebody else’s.

Concerning his own argument, I think it is at least interesting and has some very interesting ideas, although was in general quite vague and abstract. In general, the analysis of reality-systems as emanations stemming from root cosmogonic principles is an interesting choice. For me it would have required a bit more explanation why this is a good way to approach reality-systems. Also it was not easy to agree on the purported internal architecture, the cosmogony, of the Technic. Although it is a highly original choice to transpose ideas and forms of neoplatonic/islamic theology to such different topics and discourses.

The main idea is that in our current reality system we have somehow absolutized language and linguistic categories, and have made reality in a sense to collapse into these purely abstract categories. This reality-system leads to the unveiling of the world as a stockpile or standing reserve of resources, where nothing has any value but the instrumental value of endless expansion. In this quite dystopian vision of an ontology, according to Campagna, everything into measures and units within an infinite series of production. It is claimed that “to our contemporary world, Technic is God, in that it acts as the overall form encompassing all the various principles that structure our world." (64)

The first chapter was reasonable as an analysis of Technic, but then it gets quite wild. found some problems connecting the second chapter discussion about Technic to the real flesh-and-blood technological civilization we live in. Some parts are awfully abstract rambling that goes on and on, as Campagna for almost fifty pages develops the cosmogony of Technic with almost no examples, citations or references to anybody but his own thoughts. Especially the discussion about productive series, abstract general entities and the like felt a bit tenuous and difficult to understand, a kind of far-out metaphysical critique of capitalism. As an abstract and poetic picture it kind of works, is logically coherent and is aesthetical, but if taken as having a real connection or explanatory power concerning consensus reality, it is much less clear what it all means. Is there real substance in these ideas or are they just highly abstract philosophical poetry? Surely the world is revealed as a stockpile of reserves, being consumed with furious pace by the technological machinery fuelled by attitude instrumental rationality. I could kind of get a grip on what is being said, but didn’t feel that this account really helps me understand what is going on.

Although the main idea, that if the language is abstracted into a sole and absolute representation of the world disconnected from the actual persons who create the language, and this abstract picture is then equated with truth and reality, something very crucial is lost. But it is much less clear: 1) does everything Campagna claims (the four other emanations) really follows from this, and 2) is this the root source of the meaning crisis and the problem of our technological civilization? (Although something on these lines might have occurred … at least much of academia, especially in postmodern thought and analytic philosophy seems unhealthily representation and language-centric.) The sections on Technic felt a bit like sketching an abstract picture with too few connective bridges to the real world, even as building an elaborate straw man, some kind of philosophical caricature of the 20th century world. Claiming that this is the ‘reality-system’ dominating the whole modern civilization was not for me very convincing, taking into account many peculiar features of Campagna's argument. But, still the general themes between language and reality are very fascinating.

I enjoyed the second part of the book more than the first, as it was much better rooted in thinking of other thinkers. The idea is that the alternative reality system of Magic would bring the reality back into existence by connecting our linguistic categories back to the ineffable life that is prior to them, by substituting abstract linguistic categories by symbols that are points of connection to the ineffable. The main beef, the convergence of various thinkers on the topic of ineffable core of existence and opposing this to Technic was well articulated. Also illuminating was the contrast between existence and essence and the definition of reality as the space between these. I found interesting the idea that the West has tended to collapse reality onto the side of essence and some Indian philosophies to existence, but that islamic philosophical traditions might have a better balance between these. Many small topics, such as discussions of allegory/representation versus symbols (as the latter having an open-ended reference to ineffable, and former being internal to the discourse) and renaissance and babylonian gardens as models of cosmos, for example, were neat.

I would have liked to hear much more about the thoughts developed in the introduction and intermission sections of this book. The general thought about different ‘reality-systems’ popping and fading through different phases of history was a very compelling and fascinating idea, and could have been developed much more. For example, by exploring and elaborating some claims made in the beginning, such as the claim that the structures of reality-systems structure all other forms of knowing, would have brought more clarity and substance. If there are different reality-systems hegemonic in certain cultures, how exactly do the shifts happen? When do we know if one certain reality-system is hegemonic? What are the states in between?

[Zeph Webster · Rating 2 out of 5]

I fear that reviewing a book like this will summon my inner insufferable philosophy minor, so I promise I'll try to keep this comprehensible and short.
      Okay, brief synopsis, mostly in order to keep track of the threads myself:
      This book has two parts: Technic, and Magic; imagine that! In part one, Campagna argues that contemporary reality is undergirded by a system of cultural, societal, temporal, and metaphysical facticities called Technic, which regulates us through language and measure to the point of dehumanization. This has led to the overwhelming metaphysical nihilism, epidemics of mental illness, hyper-exploitation, and environmental devastation of which I'm sure we're all familiar. In part two, Campagna offers another possible system for the world he calls Magic, which inverts his own layout of Technic. In the same way that Descartes ultimately rebuilds an argument for God from his unshakable cogito ("I think therefore I am"), Campagna builds his system of Magic up from what Technic can't account for—namely, the ineffability of life; that despite the attempted naming and weighing and measuring of every facet of humanity through documentation and data-harvesting, Technic cannot account for the ineffability of a person's existence or their essence.

My rating is a balance between three aspects of the book: 1.) how much I agree with the author's arguments, 2.) judging the technical merits of his writing and logic, and 3.) my own personal enjoyment.
      To the first aspect, I can't say I completely agree with or understand his every nuance, but I will say that I think he makes a compelling case. His layout of the system of Technic is especially useful. Sometimes I'd find myself thinking that a huge amount of what he calls Technic could just be described as capitalism, but he really does synthesize a lot more strains of thought here, so I had to eat my words. The Magic section is slightly more relative, but one thing that gave me early insight early on in the book is that Campagna compares his project in writing this book to Plato's Timaeus, framing the worldview not as technical (get it?) fact, but more like a grand imaginative possibility. While this may take some of the piss out of his argument for some, in my own mind it actually gives more credence to it. Maybe it's just my relativistic ass, but I appreciate that he doesn't bring the stink of certainty into a diagnosis of the world this complex. To do so would read as silly and hubristic to me. Furthermore, just as I said I sometimes felt he could reduce Technic to capitalism, I sometimes felt in the Magic section that he could just say "go join a church, asshole," but that would be reductive of me, and given the kind of book this is, I appreciate that he takes on the burden of proof to make a fundamentally mystical argument in a secular, academic setting. It's something of a leap of faith, and while I might not be the smartest watch on the Silicon Valley bro's wrist, I'd say he sticks the landing. 
      The second aspect is where I give most brownie points. Campagna organizes his thoughts extremely well, and is clearly a top-notch philosopher and writer. Again, he clearly knows he's making a bold, weird argument to an audience that would otherwise chew him up and spit him out. So no notes there. Well done, sir. Well done.
      The third aspect, being personal enjoyment, is much more subjective. I can't say this dense, complicated book of philosophy had me on the edge of my seat or that I'll be rushing to recommend it to all the homies, but I'm glad I gave it a read.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry to see Federico Campagna go. He was very interesting for the individualist theory, yet here he is taking a mystic turn a la Focault. Maybe his reason is broken. Maybe he just needs to sell, as the Western World can be so expensive and philosophy diplomas don't pay enough to feel superior to the McDonald's server.

[Till Sunfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic esotericism. Loved the first half, second half not so much.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Consumed by the agonistic imperative to win, they promoted such expansion to the point that this eventually became their sole (and thus, paradoxically, shared) goal. The limitless expansion of the ability to put the world to productive work took over the world as its new destiny and, in so doing, erased all other ideological differences.
What else is Technic as the essence of technology, but the spirit of absolute instrumentality, according to which everything is merely a means to an end - where the only ultimate end is, once again, the limitless expansion of the accumulated productive ability?”

“If we are to adapt our concept of causality to the requirements of limitless production, then we must assume the presence of an underlying conceptual architecture that guarantees a perfectly predictable and orderly connection between 'cause' and 'effect.
Sustaining Technic's notion of causality in such a way, and acting as its conceptual foundation, we find the principle of language.
Once again, we are considering language though Technic's eyes, that is in terms of its ability to realize Technic's form in the world.
As filtered by Technic's normative form, language reveals itself as a method of production; it is the fundamental method through which it is possible to produce serial chains of units that, in turn, can entertain a productive relationship with each other. This aspect of language reveals the particular understanding of ontology that characterizes Technic's world: no longer an ontology of 'things, but an ontology of 'positions'. This passage to a 'positional ontology is a crucial requirement to the creation of a world that is devoted to - indeed, that is nothing but - endless instrumental production.“

“Within Technic, as we saw, measure is assumed as a basic ontological principle, according to which it is possible to move from an ontology of unique and irreducible 'things', to an ontology of positions in a series. Through this process, 'things' are reduced to equivalent units, which are present in the world only inasmuch as they are able to activate such grammatical positions.“

“What truly stands out as the paradigm shift between Fordism and post-Fordism, is the closure of the cycle of translation and the beginning of an age of total language. Indeed, our previous characterization of Industrial Technic as a gigantic process of translation wasn't merely metaphorical; as discussed earlier, the geometrical centre of Technic lies in the notion of measure, which informs that of instrumentality via the system of language. In order to subjugate the world of things to its own cosmos of positions, Industrial Technic proceeded by turning things into their linguistic equivalents within its own series-systems.
Things weren't just
generally reduced to their name; specifically, they were translated into their technical names. Yet, such work of translation remained posive only as long as there was something (or anything) that stil garvived as an autonomous entity outside of the grid of Technics language. Once Technic's language had affirmed its role as the sole gatekeeper to the status of legitimate existence, thus effectively taking over the entirety of the existent, the work of translation could no longer rely on the basic alterity that acted as its foundation.
With the disappearance of things outside of Technic's language, the industrial age of Technic also came to a close. The passage to post-Fordism inaugurated a new stage of Technic's cosmogony, and the dawn of an age of total language.
Once the work of translation had exhausted its main aim, and nothing remained of the human and the forest and the waterfall but the linguistic sign of their value as standing-reserves (indeed, nothing of the world remained but the linguistic sign of its instrumental value), then arose Technic's cosmos in its perfection: the whole of the existent and of the possible, reduced to a closed sphere of language, absolute in the absence of any 'outside' to it. This is the moment that we described, at the beginning of this chapter, as the collapse of the background onto the stage, or the peak of a crisis of reality. Once an exclusive principle takes over the whole, and denies the legitimacy of anything outside its own architecture, then reality is in peril. In this instance, once the principle of essence annihilated that of existence (as we shall see later in the book), to the point of denying any legitimacy whatsoever to whatever is not a position in a linguistic series, then reality is finally shattered and disintegrated.
Reality, as that frame which allows the world to emerge, requires a basic, silent understanding of an ontological distance between the frame and what emerges within it as a world. A condition of enframing that is so absolute as to deny any legitimacy to whatever isn't the frame itself, denies any possibility of reality. The complete closure of Technic's language onto itself, leads to such a condition, thus unleashing a crisis of reality of cataclysmic proportions.”

“Technic's cosmology sets a filter that allows access to a status of legitimate presence in the world, only to those who have undergone a fundamental mutation in their ontological structure, and thus also in their position as ethical subjects. In this sense, the metaphysical policing enacted by Technic is always a form of border control, enforcing the most profound kind of discrimination.”

“To our contemporary world, Technic is God, in that it acts as the overall form encompassing all the various principles that structure our world. In this sense, any attempt at analysing the spirit of an age, understood as the structure of a specific reality-system, cannot do without the conceptual toolkit of theology - in particular, of the branch of theology that looks at the process of cosmogony and at cosmological architecture. Among the different theological and philosophical traditions that have tackled this issue, we have chosen in particular the variegated school of Neoplatonism, with its emanationist conception of reality-making.
Emanationism will function here as a method to interpret the architecture of a cosmogonic force, considered as a form with its own internal structure.“

“In fact, they are merely their own simultaneous presence within multiple series, that is, they are nothing more than the simultaneous activation of positions in different series. The availability of the object of truth (i.e. a state of affairs that 'is or not the case') to feature simultaneously in several different locations or series, amounts to its ability to be represented infinitely. This form of infinite replicability, raised to the level of an ontological principle, does not refer to the case of an original being copied countless times, but rather to something being simultaneously present in a potentially infinite number of locations.
Since this ability to be limitlessly re-presented is a specific and constitutive aspect of state of affairs within absolute language, we can take it as one of their defining ontological qualities.
Understood as such, representation has to do at the same time with the non-specificity and non-substantiality of the 'stuff' that makes up Technic's cosmology, and with its availability to be replicated indefinitely, that is to be the object of production.”

“the organization of industrial production and in certain branches of information technology - as the productive software is progressively emancipated from the hardware, despite the fact that a clean cut from the material support is as yet practically impossible. Examples of the second strategy of a hostile takeover are found especially in the field of biotechnology, where the mixing of vulnerable living material and pure linguistic sequences of production is pursued to the utmost limit 2s In either case, the result is that the emergence of life within Technic's world (and more generally, of anything depending on a different form of temporality), is presented in the form of a problem, an obstacle and a vulnerability. As it is included within Technic's cosmology, the living dimension of the existent (better, the existent in its living dimension, as we will see in the next chapter) is assigned the role of that which needs to be redeemed.
Despite its apparent secularism, Technic has retained and enforced a number of categories deriving from the religious tradition - among them, that of sin, which re-emerges here with particular strength.26 Life as vulnerability is the ontological sin that needs to be purged, the impurity that demands to be cleansed. As long as it remains available to be 'saved', however partially (and thus, infinitely), the living dimension of the existent is granted citizenship in the world.
But whatever remains totally impenetrable to Technic's attempt to redeem it - that is, to mutate it into a stockpiling of units ready for the infinite proliferation of productive series - is discarded as absolutely implausible, as radical non-presence.
Although it comes at the end of the chain of emanations, and at the setting of the sun of absolute language, this fifth and last hypostasis plays a fundamental role in the economy of the whole chain. We can better appreciate the importance of this cosmogonic level, if we approach it via its archetypal incarnation as possibility.”

“This method of resolution of a structural failure could be described as 'resolution through simulation' 27 What is impossible to resolve in its totality, is considered in its parts as a cluster of individual possibilities of resolution. By selecting increasingly minute portions of the impossible, and by turning them into small possible victories, Technic denies its own limits while progressing indefinitely in its infinite chase after itself. In this perspective, we can also appreciate the role played by incremental innovations in all fields of contemporary activity, and the conspicuous absence of any authentic instance of groundbreaking innovation in recent decades.
A possibility is thus to be understood, not as a radical form of indeterminacy, but rather as a gap that exists only inasmuch as it is possible to fill it. A possibility is a 'not-as-yet' that, in Technic's own conception of time, is always-already resolved, since its presence is exactly as 'that which can be resolved'.“

“It is here, just when it fades, that Technic's cosmogony hits back and recoils, returning to its first principle as a new beginning for a repetition of its cosmogony. A possibility, considered in itself is the most primordial measure of absolute language; it is the pure virtuality of that which, in the end, cannot be but abstract language.
It is a question with only one possible solution, since it is drawn negatively according to the solution itself. As it reaches life, and encounters it as an obstacle, Technic is capable of regenerating its own cosmology by declaring life as a mere vulnerability, a problem awaiting a solution: pure possibility.“

“As we saw in earlier pages, Technic's founding movement consists in making a thing's legitimate claim to existence entirely dependent on its detectability and classification by the system of seriality and by absolute language - to the point that a thing is liquefied into its very classification. Conversely, Magic's cosmogonic process originates precisely from that dimension of existence which can never be reduced to any linguistic classification. In the perspective of Technic, we identified this dimension as that 'something' whose resistance to annihilation gave rise to the symptom of pain.”

“The only type of desire that finds no legitimacy here is, of course, that which is entirely negative - a form of total anhedonia that seeks no redemption or supplement. And indeed, we find this form of disobedience rapidly expanding throughout the world ruled by Technic. The contemporary epidemic of depression, the radical emptying of all pleasure that is still desperately covered by the enforcement of ever-stricter injunctions to enjoy, is a signal of this terrifying form of resistance. Once again, that which manages to escape Technic's cosmology does so as pain and suffering, as a slow form of stoic suicide.“

“the name issued by the ineffable, how is this new entity supposed to call itself? How is it to understand its own position and role”

“Magic's cosmogonic chain. As soon as the ineffable's first word, 'this' or 'I', becomes aware of its own position as a 'person', the processes symbolized by Apollo and the Imam take place simultaneously. They are two aspects of the endless construction of a 'person', as a suitable place for the epiphany (mazhar) of the ineffable.“

“It takes the frame of a sentence to allow the ineffable to emerge as sphota.
For this reason, we identified the building-unit of Magic's world with the figure of the symbol and, particularly, with the mythologem as its incarnation. Both the symbol and the mythologem are, in themselves, compressed sentences, in that they exceed that function of atomic classification that belongs instead to the figure of the allegory (following Goethe's interpretation,
among others). A
symbol functions as a particular framework that is irreducible to its constituent atomic elements; it is irreducible to its sign, verbal or non-verbal as it may be, as well as to its immediate signification.
As such, it is closer to Bhartharis notion of a sentence, than to that of a word. Indeed, symbols have their own internal syntax, although at such a level of complexity that renders it exceptionally difficult to detect. But this forth hypostasis wishes to push the scope of symbolic language one step further. Although symbols already act like micro-sentences, capable of manifesting the ineffable as their sphota, it is also possible to conceive of ampler syntaxes, made of the combination of a plurality of symbols, just like narratives result from the combination of a plurality of sentences. Needless to Say, this particular conception of symbolic syntax bears important consequences also in terms of a theory of poetry - though this is not a topic that we shall consider in-depth at this point of our exploration.”

“Each stone, by itself, would require firm support to sustain its own weight. Yet, when placed together in the form of the semicircular Roman arch, it is exactly the weight of each stone that counter-balances that of all others. Lightness is achieved through a combination of weights. A principle is achieved through its opposite, as if the opposite was already contained within the same.
Such is the structure of the paradox presented as the principle of Magic's fifth and final hypostasis. 74
The crucial point here is that opposing forces and principles can coexist paradoxically, not by annihilating each other, but by combining together. Of course, this is not an instance of pluralism, but rather a case of coincidence of opposites - where the keyword is coincidence', which is unlike both 'difference and identity.
Within the structure of the Roman arch, opposing weights achieve an overall lightness, not because they are all identical (if that was so, they would only add to each other), or merely different from each other (in that case, each of them would require special support), but because they 'fall together', as per the Latin co-incidere. Their 'fall' - in Gnosticism, a frequent term to refer to existence in the world? — is simultaneous, thus constituting a single event. Yet, their singularity as one event doesn't do without their respective singularities as individual entities.”

“Rather than a direct assault against the social reality of our time and its underlying principles, it is a way to void it from the inside. By already inhabiting a different architecture of reality, Magic's person creates an immediately effective alternative to Technic's world-making. Such a course of action doesn't seek to dialectically overcome the present, but rather to move beyond it. It is a withdrawal that is also an exit - and an exit that is also the foundation of an alternative reality-system.
Coherently with the intense 'biopolitical' colonization of our lives by Technic, Magic's first impact on our world takes place exactly at the level of a person's lived experience of the world. By removing the existential involvement of a person into the very mechanisms of capture that are laid by Technic's institutions, Magic's as if' goes to erode at the core the very material that sustains and makes up the edifice of Technic's world.”

“As shaped by contemporary activity, each
"thing' in the world hosts within itself the potential to become any other 'thing' (or in Technic's parlance, each position can become any other position), while never actually being forced to become anything at all. The perfect and 'safest' state in Technic's world is that in which a thing is nothing at all in itself, while remaining available to be rapidly transformed into anything else; this is the state of the perfect instrument, which is at once its own material, instrument and product.
So, what is the peculiarity of this kind of activity? Its peculiarity, perhaps surprisingly, is that such form of activity is entirely ineffectual. Indeed, it focuses on expanding potentiality, not on bringing about any actualized form.”

“The Russian poet Fëdor Ivanovic Tjutcev offers us a beautiful image of Magic's finale, which he presents in the form of a wish.

My soul would like to be a star,
But not when, like living eyes,
From the midnight sky,
They stare upon our sleepy world.
No, but during daytime when, hidden
By the searing haze of sunlight,
Like ever-brighter deities
They burn unseen in the pure ether.”

[Virginia]

🤲🏻🌄

[Aggelos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una foresta non è piu una foresta, ma una riserva di legname pronta per essere mandata in produzione, una cascata non è piu una cascata, ma una riserva di energia idroelettrica pronta per essere estratta; una persona non è piu una persona, ma una riserva di lavoro pronta per essere impiegata.
L'espansione illimitata della capacità di sottoporre il mondo al lavoro produttivo ha finito per imporsi come il destino del mondo stesso, cancellando ogni altra differenza ideologica...cos'è altro la Tecnica, in quanto essenza della tecnologia, se non lo spirito di un'assoluta strumentalità nei confronti della quale ogni cosa è meramente un mezzo per un fine- dove l'unico fine è, ancora una volta, l'espansione senza limiti della capacità di accumulare?

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could possibly speak with Campagna for hours happily debating some of the points and turns in this work. I could also spill a lot of digital ink explaining why I enjoyed this. However, suffice it to say that if anybody wants to understand my outlook on life, I will very peaceably point them in the direction of this book.

[Matthew Butler · Rating 4 out of 5]

An existential tour through HELL, except instead of Virgil as your tour guide it's Plotinus. There are Singular things that emanate rays or something. I actually agree with the author that Reality has been reconstructed.

[Goatboy · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I wanted to I could probably nitpick certain small items I disagreed with while reading this but in hindsight that seems petty for what felt like an incredibly valuable read. I thought I was prepared to write a long review of this but have let just a bit too much time lapse to feel like I have a good handle on my thoughts. Perhaps I will come back after a re-read (which is almost certain) to add more thoughts in the future.

For now I'll just say that this book came to me at an incredibly synchronistic and important time as one of my goals for this year is to find a way to crawl out of my personal nihilism, which has both crusted around me while simultaneously hollowing me out, in the last decade or so of my life. Not only did the first half of this book help me put into words why that might have happened by explaining how a "reality system" of absolute language might leave humans feeling empty, anxious, and rudderless, but the second half also reminded me of truths I once believed and sadly, somehow, lost track of.

It is by remembering and honoring the ineffable in existence - over the definable in essence - that one can reconnect with that feeling (call it spirit, magic, Lacan's Real as well as your singularity [to also reference Mara Ruti]) that we can return to a livable balance of day-to-day existence. Not by erasing the reality construct of language and essence, but by realizing - and more importantly feeling - that we exist on a continuum between these two poles of pure existence and pure essence, and finding our best location on that continuum.

After all the words are spoken, systems structured, ink spilled, there is still always something else that cannot be corralled, tied down, completely explicated, in life. It is our relationship to that always receding yet also always welcoming "thing" that defines each of our lives and our lives with each other.

The sooner we remember that, and honor that in our daily lives, the better off we will be.

[Boris Contarin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great expectations, re-enchantment, and postmodern disillusionment. None of that. What is repeated here are all the vices of a mode of thought that obsessively thematizes the near-conspiratorial drift Heidegger falls into after emerging from his mystical trip through Being in the German woods and attempting to deal with current affairs. One cannot help but profane themes such as environmentalism and industrialization when handling them with hands soiled by abstraction. The result can only be a sand cake that reeks of disappointment.
A heavily overthought book, undoubtedly the product of many hours spent refining a painfully systematic and symmetrical structure. Embarrassingly inadequate metaphors, recycled ideas and frameworks producing, through sheer unawareness, a result of pure disharmony. I truly don’t want to waste more time explaining how kitsch many of the comparisons in this text are, how consistently unsuccessful its supposedly precise metaphors turn out to be, how Plotinus’ One is desecrated, gutted of its entrails and worn like the skin of a corpse as a disguise to lead us through this waste of time along a ghostly conception of technics—so meticulous in its metaphysical manifestations that it inevitably appears teleological and conspiratorial.
I genuinely feel guilty for being such a hater, but perhaps the hatred is proportional to the disappointment of expectation. The title sounds brimming with potential, as does the subsequent book, the one on the Mediterranean. Especially within the art bubble, where this author thrives, books are bought for their covers even if few bother to read them. I tried, and—something I rarely manage—I managed not to manage to finish it.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Operationalizing this, which Campagna fails to do in the closing pages of his remarkable book, is one of the only ways I see us avoiding certain annihilation in the next 30-50 years.

AI-generated content creates a double bind: one direction spews a firehose of gasoline on the climate and societal crises through the annihilation of significant symbolic forms, while the other twists the vice completely flattening our ontological plane into a pure plane of anxiety-ridden immanence. All that remains are flickering points of affective screams seeking acknowledgment in a sea of AI-generated noise, and pure, unadulterated violence, vividly represented in the wastelands of Mad Max.

How do we operationalize this? Campagna failed to provide a solution, but he did give us a map. Who's first?

[Sergio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uno de los libros que más he disfrutado leer, de esos a los que sabes que tarde o temprano vuelves

Me parece genial la cantidad de autores de épocas y lugares distintos que nombra a lo largo del libro

Creo que hay momentos del libro donde es fácil perderse un poco, pero una vez lo acabas todas las piezas encajan, por eso también es un libro que puedes leer dos, tres, cuatro veces y vas a seguir sacando conclusiones/reflexiones interesantes sobre aquello que está contenido en sus páginas y sobre lo que escapa a las mismas

Desde luego un 10/10 se lo recomendaría muchísimo a cualquier persona con un mínimo de interés en política, filosofía, teología o historia

[Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though I can't claim I understood or agreed with everything in this book, I rate it this highly because it was simply a pleasure to read, the sort of book you cant wait to get back into. This, for me, was because it's a book that makes me question, makes me think, and above all it makes me want to go back into my creative projects. It also made me very keen to learn more about other subjects it briefly glossed over. Highly recommend this book and hope to reread it one day when my, admitley poor, knowledge of philosophy has been honed further.

[Patsy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dit is de tweede keer dat ik het boek lees, dit keer ben ik niet tot het einde gegaan. Ondanks dat ik het wel erg eens ben met de premise van het gehele boek, is het somehow zo moeilijk te lezen of langdradig aan elkaar gepraat dat ik vaak niet helemaal meer weet wat ik nou echt gelezen heb… of het komt omdat ik al redelijk bekent ben met de concepten die hij probeert over te brengen dat voor mij die eindeloze voorbeelden of citaten niet nodig zijn?

[Kyle Sanderfer · Rating 2 out of 5]

[DNF] Campagna's book, while intriguing in its premise, proves to be overambitious and underexplained. Most of the book feels like its implying an argument while avoiding directly making it (and not in the sense that its complex but instead in the sense that it spells out only the most basic of its premises and leaves any of the actual philosophical grunt work undone). Exciting at points but ultimately dissatisfying.

[James Mol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great concept. Has brilliant sections and then lengthy sections that are painfully dry and "technical." It was refreshing to learn more about non-western religious and philosophical underpinnings. Despite the book's difficulty, it's definitely worth a read. There aren't many subjects more important and less considered.

[Stella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was difficult for me to rate because it's an excellent and important book- but I also think that coming from my perspective, already having a background of Magick it was redundant. I think it's an amazing book if you're trying to educate someone on the basics of meta reality.

[irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

l'ho appena finito e vorrei ricominciarlo per assorbirlo meglio e ancora. tre mesi ci ho messo, a leggerlo. madonna quanto è difficile la filosofia. ma ne vale la pena. ha messo in ordine quasi tutto quello che mi sta in testa.

[Egle · Rating 5 out of 5]

"My soul would like to be a star,
but not when these bright things in midnight skies, like living eyes,
gaze at our sleepy earth-world.
No, but during daytime when, hidden
By the searing haze of sunlight,
Like ever-brighter deities
They burn unseen."

[Vanessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has become my new "bible", if I may say so. It reflects so much, and so well, about what is wrong with our current reality, while managing to put the magic, the undescribable into words and opening worlds.

[Tyler Alterman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frustrating writing style but essential material

[Devin Bee · Rating 4 out of 5]

****1/2