📚 The Book Club Is Back! Next Up: Prophetic Culture by Federico Campagna

Join us for a deep dive into one of the coolest books I've read in years.

"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, Prof. of Design and Social Inquiry, The New School

"We are on the bridge between worlds: Federico Campagna shows us how we might remake the cartographies of the next… Prophetic Culture is the foundational book for the day after tomorrow."
— Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers, Ignota Books

TL;DR: Become a patron and talk about this book with me. Get a copy here if you can and support indie booksellers, then join me here to pre-game and mark your calendars for our live study group session on May 3rd. (Everyone I’ve ever had on the show as a guest is welcome to a free lifetime membership and invited to join in!)

Talking about “the metacrisis” is passé. Now what?

Based on the enthusiastic recommendation of my friend J.F. Martel, I just sunk my teeth into the work of Italian philosopher Federico Campagna — in particular, Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (2021). This is a book that cut me deep, inspired and validated me, and brought great clarity to my lifelong inquiry into What Work Is Worth Doing Right Now. I marked nearly every page so I could come back to passages both virtuosic and illuminating, and it would be foolish of me not to re-open the dormant Future Fossils Book Club in order to discuss it with you. So we’re going to do just that — first asynchronously in a members-only channel of the FF Discord Server and then on a live community call on Saturday, May 3rd. This should give everyone enough time to get their copy, give it the attention it’s due, and prep for a powerful discussion.

Campagna defines a “Tetrapharmakon” of four archetypes — the metaphysician, shaman, mystic, and prophet — each of which, in their own way, helps cultures to navigate a cosmos bigger than we can know, and draws on examples across continents and millennia to make the case that what we need now is “a prophetic approach [that] sees the possibility for a subject, through their activity of worlding, to escape from their captivity in pre-established frames of sense.” In some of my favorite chapters, he describes this as a kind of therapy, exhumes the theological notion of “Apocatastasis” as an alternative to Apocalypse, defends the value of the grotesque, and calls for an insurrection against orthodoxy and nihilism.

(For a quick hit of the vibe I want to share with you, I recommend Andrea Bellini’s FlashArt interview with Campagna. That ought to be enough to sell you. And just to be fair, here’s a critical review by Anna Enström that nonetheless admits she experienced a “force of aesthetic enjoyment found in the [book’s] juxtapositions of poetic, philosophical and theological material.”)

When I side with reviewers in calling Prophetic Culture “visionary” please know I don’t use this term lightly. I developed a rigorous sense for what does and doesn’t qualify over a decade working in the poorly-policed domain of “Visionary Art”, where it’s commonplace for people to get lifted, sling paint, and make premature bids for a place at the table among some of the most daring and technically-advanced artists of the last century. But Campagna definitely deserves the designation. His writing is at once deeply researched, wise, and lyrical, and gave me new language with which to describe the landscapes I’ve tried my best to report from since it first became obvious almost twenty years ago that the old language wasn’t cutting it.

(He even addresses why I and so many others have often failed at this — true visions of eternity transcend any given civilization’s mode of “worlding” and challenge its internal logic. Prophets stutter and their prophecies bemuse. How Campagna manages to speak so clearly about the ineffable is as baffling as his subject and a testament to the care he has paid this work. But then again, he describes prophecy as an act that interrogates the assumption of authorship and even identity. This is the fertile soil of meaning-making in which, he argues, Those Who Come After will find the new myths We At The End of An Era struggle so mightily to produce for them.)

For people who dug James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games and want to anchor those insights in something more scholarly and numinous…or for people who can’t help but stare into the mouth of madness by savoring reads like Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand The World but suspect there must be something on the other side of the epistemic abyss…Prophetic Culture is your jam.

In other words, if you follow this blog and podcast, you’re pre-selected. Enjoy, and I can’t wait for us to riff together on it.