Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London. His latest books with Bloomsbury are 'Otherworlds: Mediterranean lessons on escaping History' (2025), 'Prophetic Culture: Recreation for adolescents' (2021), and 'Technic and Magic: The reconstruction of reality' (2018). He is Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London, and a lecturer at The Architectural Association in London and at ECAL in Lausanne. He is the co-founder of the Italian publishing house Timeo and a director at the Anglo-American radical publisher Verso. He frequently collaborates as speaker and public program advisor with some of the main museums in Europe.How do we get there from here? If "there" is a more merciful, a more peaceful world, how on earth can we even imagine it? In this beautiful and empowering book, Federico Campagna shows his readers that the path is easier than they might expect. One needs simply to to jiggle the key of the imagination in the lock of the past, and lo—the secret door opens. It was there all along. Like Simone Weil, Campagna argues that the feeling of belonging somewhere is the shape of that key, that nations and empires cannot copyright this feeling...and like Cornelius Castoriadis, Campagna shows that the work of imagination, available to all brains anywhere, not reserved to lofty theorists, is the revolutionary work par excellence. A masterpiece.
Professor Timothy Morton, author of books including The Ecological Thought (2012), Realist Magic (2013), Dark Ecology (2018) and The Stuff of Life (2023)
Federico Campagna’s <i>Otherworlds</i> is a crucial book for the 21st Century. It’s a book about Mediterranean togetherness as its own reality system, through which we can understand existence. Campagna’s system are not absolute, but always subject to change.
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of Serpentine, London, UK.
What can survive the end of the world?
In Otherworlds, philosopher Federico Campagna constructs extraordinary stories and alternative histories of the Mediterranean, nexus of migrations and odysseys, ruins and romances, to depict a world in which the imagination is the only engine of survival.
Chapter by chapter, Campagna chronicles the existential challenges posed by history and the inventive and radical responses of people facing the ruin of their world. From the earliest myths with which the inhabitants of the kingdoms around the Mediterranean constructed a shared social reality, the stories of the Mediterranean are dominated by cataclysm and collapse in which fugitive fragments become the building blocks of resilience and renewal. Alexander the Great’s cataclysmic conquests seed a cycle of existential romances; pagan philosophers fleeing the fall of Rome give rise to new visions of reality; translators across the Islamic world, Iberia and Italy use stories to bridge the gap between cultures at war and pirates, slaves, renegades and publishers expand the imaginative horizons of human possibility through modernity and beyond.
In Campagna’s lyrical, novel and expansive work – part history, part philosophy, part love letter to a heritage of seasonal migration and searches for belonging – the challenges of disintegration and destruction are time and again met with the creation of new and radical realities. As rich and various as the philosophy, myths, literature and art of the Mediterranean itself, Otherworlds traces the tales of these attempts to reinvent the world – and reveals how, at the most dramatic and decisive junctures of Mediterranean history, it was the ability to set sail for these other worlds which prevailed
0. Introduction: Seasons.
1. Mortals – The Bronze Age
2. Foreigners – Hellenism
3. Cosmonauts – Late Antiquity
4. Translators – The Middle Ages
5. Traitors – Modernity
6. Migrants – The Contemporary Age
Bibliography and Further Reading Endnote