Federico Campagna: Prophetic Culture I

On 28 May 2020, Ignota hosted Federico Campagna, author of Technic and Magic, for the first of a two-part lecture presenting his forthcoming book Prophetic Culture.

Philosophy and science agree: time doesn’t exist. And yet, it keeps on flowing. It spans between the beginning and the end of world narratives like the rhythm of music. Each world-song has a time of its own; the particular rhythm that was peculiar to the civilisation of Westernised Modernity appears to be approaching the end of its course. So what: this is nothing new under the sun of history. Every world has a beginning and an end. The imperative of this age has just slightly changed: from learning how to live well, to learning how to die well.

What does this entail for culture? What does it mean to make art, music, philosophy when a future is about to end, and a new time is as yet to begin? Across two talks, Federico Campagna will explore ‘prophetic culture’ as a millenia-old inspiration for contemporary cultural producers standing at the edge between worlds and ages.

Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London. He is the author of Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (2018), The Last Night: Anti-Work, Atheism, Adventure (2013) and What We Are Fighting For: A Radical Collective Manifesto (2012) and visiting lecturer at Royal College of Art, UK.