Bloomsbury Academic Prophetic Culture: Recreation For Adolescents

Selected as one of The Tablet’s Books of the Year 2021Throughout 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? Review 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, USAA 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, USAIt’s not enough to realize that the world is ending; we need to learn how to dream up new ones. Federico Campagna’s <i>Prophetic Culture― </i>a worthy successor to his <i>Technic and Magic― </i>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 About the Author 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.