Myth, Nostalgia, and Liberation: Federico Campagna’s 'Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons On Escaping History'

This is Left Hand, and I am your host, Sirrepti, aka Craig from the Asad Horizon podcast. If you're new on Asad Horizon, or if you have forgotten Left Hand, this is a space where I explore philosophy, myth, mysticism, and esotericism, not as curiosities on the margins, but as vital intersections with struggles for liberation, anti-capitalism, and the project of a dawning world beyond domination. Today's episode is, as you can tell, an Asad Horizon crossover, and the thematic intersection will be addressing could not be more urgent. Why does myth continue to return, even in a supposedly disenchanted world? And when myth resurfaces, does it give us tools for transformation, or it's reimagining, or does it risk being captured by nostalgia, nationalism, and reaction? Studies among many other questions are at the heart of Federico Campagna's new book, Other Worlds, Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History. Other worlds offers not only reflections on myth and history, emerging out of a Mediterranean context, but also a series of extraordinary meditations that move from figures in the pantheon of Mesopotamian gods, to mystics in the modern age, exploring myths of catastrophe, transformation, and solidarity, and the Mediterranean as a matrix in which imagination itself continues to be generated and transformed. Some of you might remember that a few years ago, I spoke with Federico about his earlier book, Technic and Magic. I will post that conversation in the show notes if you'd like to revisit it. And before we begin, I'd also like to thank Bloomsbury for graciously providing me with a copy of Other Worlds. If you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to Left Hand and go to the show notes below while you're listening and hit subscribe. And so let's turn to our guest Federico Campagna, the philosopher and writer whose new book Other Worlds offers not only a theory of myth, but a way of imagining life beyond the rigid categories of politics and history. Federico, welcome to the show. Hello Craig, it's a pleasure to be back. Yes, so let's get right into it. First of all, I will tell you and I will tell the listeners, I love this book for many reasons. And I want to talk about exactly what I think this book is for me and for other people. But before getting into that, let's talk about the reason for writing this book. So in the opening chapter of Other Worlds, you recall your childhood in Sicily and the ritual of waiting for the dead to visit on all souls day. And this early experience of living alongside another world that is both invisible and present. And these early experiences seem to spark a lifetime of insights, which illuminate a kind of exciting weave of, as you say, chaos and cosmos that drives the themes of this book forward. Could you just begin by telling us how those early memories set the stage for this book and why you chose to frame other worlds as a set of quote unquote Mediterranean lessons on escaping history? Well, the Mediterranean is the place where my family is from and I am from even though I don't live there. And the fact that I don't live there is key to writing this book. The book begins with an image from a childhood of migrants going back to Northern Europe from Sicily after the summer holidays. And it ends as you were mentioning with all Saints day, the day of the dead, where the dead visit the children bringing them gifts of sweets. Both these moments are kind of mirror to each other. They are presences of something invisible. In the sense of the, well, in the case of the dead, that's very clear. You have ghosts visiting and so there is a link between what's visible and what's invisible. In the case of the migrants is maybe less obvious, but migrants are ghosts. They are never quite there, even though they are there. I know it by experience. My parents migrated from Sicily. I migrated from Italy. I have a son who knows where he's going to migrate. But wherever you are, as a migrant, you are never fully present and never fully absent. Neither in your new home, neither in your old home. This is something that always struck me as a child and gave me, I think, an early insight into some metaphysical speculations. But also gave me a key to understand one aspect of the Mediterranean that is not quite prevalent in the way in which the Mediterranean is understood in history books or presented in tourist brochures. The Mediterranean is a land where things are not quite entirely there, including the people. And when they are there, they are there in a way that is very strange. They are there but not fully themselves. This is the topic of syncretism. Synchretism is a mode of cultural production that mixes things from many different provinces and produces end results, rituals, cuisines, languages that are undefiable. They are not precisely located anywhere. They don't have a fixed identity. So to me, the Mediterranean embodied this long tradition of ghostliness. So it's a dark Mediterranean in a sense without being Gothic, obviously, being the Mediterranean. But also, a possibility of understanding how one can live in the world with a form of detachment. So I wanted also to propose this, not just as a morning, as a limitation of how things should be different and people should be fully present in their home. I'm definitely, definitely not an activist in any form. But rather, I was trying to distill from this experience some lessons that can apply in every day life in the way in which we relate with the place where we are, with the identities we inhabit, the societies where we are living, to which we don't belong, but too often we believe we belong. And so, yeah, that's how I started getting into the idea of this book. Yeah. And one of the things that I love about this book is how you lift up figures who have crossed thresholds of history. I mean, clearly not just yourself. Some mythic figures like Gilgamesh, some of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian gods, Alexander Julian, the apostate, Menander, Joseph Roth, so many others. And not many of these figures are reduced to any particular fixed political coordinates, nor regional coordinates as well. And I will just say that a kind of superficial reading or encounter with this book is actually very delightful and productive in some ways because it can almost be read as a digest or a chronicle of history, which I appreciate because I'm not immersed in history enough. So it was like kind of a reminder or a primer even of Mediterranean history. But of course, threaded through with some of the themes that we're going to unfold here. Let's talk about the figures that you have chosen like Gilgamesh, for example, or the Mesopotamian gods. We actually just had an episode on Gilgamesh with Stuart Kendall. So this particular conversation that we're having here today is going to dovetail nicely with that. But then there's the figure of Alexander, not only as a real living historical figure, but as this more diaphanus or mythic figure who gets dispersed into other regions of the world, namely India, namely the Muslim world. Let's talk about the organization of the book itself. OK. Well, first a very brief introduction to the main topic in my mind, the ladies of the book. The book is readable and it was meant to be read as a long arabesque of stories. Stories there are also histories, so they're not invented. But they're usually very little known. And the thesis of the book is to explore the Mediterranean world through the lens of its imagination and to focus in particular on those moments in the history of the Mediterranean when things went very badly, when there was a catastrophe of some sort to which people could not react productively. So they could not change it. They could not reverse it. This is something I'm always been very interested in. As well as revolutionary politics, I'm also interested in entering politics during periods of defeat. Of course, the bright sun of revolution will shine the day after tomorrow, but until then most of us will be defeated. How do you survive the experience of being defeated, possibly until the end of your days? If characters they're exploring this book are examples of how you can do it. So even though some of them are great, very few to be honest, but Alexander the great is the main one, they are all observed under particular lens that makes them appear as defeated characters that nonetheless resurrected themselves in some form. So I will give you a brief breakdown of the structure of the book is divided into six chapters. Each chapter analyzes one, kind of has one protagonist, a collective protagonist. And this collective protagonist exists in a historical era, that is quite large, and faces a particular challenge. In the first chapter, which begins in the Bronze Age, we look at mostly mythographers or writers of myths in ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia. That's where we have the first extant written records, the beginning or history proper. The catastrophe they were facing was mortality. How do you make sense of something that you cannot revert? They did that through mythological narrations, and we can talk, of course, more about mythology, if you like. And the myths that I recount, some of which are known, some of which are lesser known, have some protagonists, including Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu, including some of the Egyptian gods and their nemesis. The main aspect that comes out of this chapter is the idea that you can react to this, to the tragedy of mortality through two different strategies, which are equivalent, in a sense, the strategy of hopefulness and the strategy of hopelessness. Each of these two strategies gave rise to traditions, wonderful traditions. The Greek tradition, for example, of ancient Greece comes out of the strategy of hopelessness, developed by the Mesopotamians. The Christian tradition comes out of the strategy of hopefulness developed by the ancient Egyptians. In a sense, these stories, which are very far into the past, I think, are very close to our everyday experience today. I'm thinking, for example, of the writing of Franco de la Vdbifo, a contemporary Italian philosopher who is very dear to my heart, and who is now writing very much about hopelessness as a political strategy. I keep more and more unbivalent position in this, and I present all the different options. The second chapter is dedicated to foreigners. So people dislocated from their particular societies by cataclysmic political events. The setting is Hellenism, the time of Alexander the Great. The protagonist is Alexander the Great, but not the real one. Better, the real one, but not as we have it presented in our history books. Alexander the Great had, as it was reinterpreted by the peoples that were defeated by his army. So the Egyptians, the Persians, and then later on, also by the Muslim writers, the Alexander that is reinvented in these different variations is a completely fantastical figure. It's somebody who is a foreigner to every land, which is, by the way, the definition of the perfect person according to Hugh Ofsen Victor, a definition of the mystic. A foreigner to every land who is on an endless quest. And this particular quest, as it's pinnacle, the moment when Alexander the Great looks for the spring of eternal youth. This is a story that appears in various versions of the so-called romance of Alexander. In the Muslim versions, Alexander the Great goes in search of the spring of eternal youth and finds a companion called Hedra. Hedra is the green man of Islamic tradition, very strange character. Kind of like a trickster. And in the company of Hedra, Alexander the Great tries to find the spring fails, fails because of his own failings, Hedra finds it by Alexander fails, and then is destined to die anyway. Hedra is the counterpart, the doppelganger to Alexander. Of course, I will leave it to the readers to find out how in the book and how this connects with the practice of master'ship in Sufi traditions in Islam. Then the third chapter called Cosmonotes is set in late antiquity. The antiquity is, to my mind, one of the most interesting moments in history of all, especially for us today. It's the time around the fall of the Western Roman Empire. So the dates are vague, but just a bit before the Middle Ages and a bit after the end of antiquity. Moment of great turmoil. I look in this chapter at the Cosmonotes, so people that were exploring the universe in order to escape a world where they were no longer welcome. So Julian the postate, the great Roman Emperor, the last pagan Roman Emperor, every time when Christianity was already majoritarian, at least at a political level, is one of the protagonists. But the main protagonists are strange characters like Hermes Trismegistus, the founder, the mythological founder of Hermetism, the schools of the Nostics. And characters like Zoe, Sophia, Yaldabaoth, I will not expand here, but the story is narrated by the Nostics, which we found only recently in 1945. For the first time, we had a glimpse at Nostic literature are extraordinary. And for any reader who ever wondered how the Matrix came out as an idea, well, that's where it came from. That's a Nostic Gospel. This chapter ends in front of the shores of Taiwan. This is one aspect of the Mediterranean. It is very important to me. The Mediterranean is a method of going through catastrophes, escaping, deserting history, being always absent and always present at the same time. And it doesn't have geographical boundaries. It is a method. It is a synchrotistic method of survive. The first chapter dedicated to translators looks a little known by incredible history, to which we owe contemporary and modern Western science. Modern Western science comes out of an incredible effort to translate the legacy of Greek science, especially medicine, but also astronomy and astrology, mathematics, optics, geometry and so on and so forth, as well as, you know, alchemistic and magical literature. Noted by the Abbasid Caliphs, so the earliest Caliphal deenasties in Islam. The translators did this job where, typically, Christians, Syrian Christians living in Muslim lands. Later on, this movement of translation was carried out by Muslim translators, living in Christian lands, as well as by Jewish translators living under persecutions in Catholic lands. So I followed the trail of the translators from the beginning of Islam to the Italian Renaissance. And here we have extraordinary figures like Constantinus Afrikaans. Constantinus Afrikaans was the greatest translators of book and philosophy, but as if he had read Kenneth Gaul's text on uncreativity, he declared that he was the author of the books he translated. He signed them with his own name. So I saw it, he found that the greatest medical school in the Middle Ages in Europe. But then it continues with other extraordinary characters like Flavius Mithridatus, converted Jew, who became Tikodalanirandola Stranslato and then escaped at some point because he was involved in a murder. We looked at people like the Marranos, the converted Jews as secretly practiced Judaism and created through this practice a tradition that is now known as Kabbalism. The fifth chapter is titled Traders and this one is set in modernity. Traders are, well, traders are deserters. People that renounce their allegiance to their flag because of circumstances, mostly. Sometimes because of ideology, but often because of circumstances. The protagonist of this chapter are slaves and pirates in the Mediterranean world. It is little known, but there was a massive trade of slaves within the Mediterranean world, millions of people, but very different from the transatlantic trade, entirely incomparable. The main reason was that you had two superpowers, the Islamic world and the Christian world. They were both, to be honest, fragmented and so on, but there were two blocks. And since they were equivalent in power, they treated each other's slaves with a modicum of respect. But also encouraged integration of former slaves. Slavery was temporary. You have extraordinary stories of people that became integrated in the new society. You have people like Miguel de Cervantes, the writer and the author of Don Quixote, sped five years as a slave in Algiers. You have also Piccinine, the Venetian sailor who integrated so well in Algiers that he became one of the heads of the pirates' congregation of Algiers, especially infamous. Or people like Ochali, who was a Calabrian fisherman, who was kidnapped as a child, and then became the admiral of the Ottoman fleet. So through the stories of slaves and pirates of betrayal, I analyzed how it's possible to reinvent oneself completely while renaly entirely foreign and to a reliant. And finally, the sixth chapter, sorry, this is a bit long, but the book is quite rich stories. The sixth chapter is called migrants. It explores the contemporary age, and it begins in Paris. By the way, the fifth chapter on Traitor's begins in Florida, because the first character is a Spanish person who becomes enslaved by the natives of Florida and then becomes a shaman. It's an extraordinary story. Al-Barnuñez, Cabezadeba, one of the most incredible books I've ever read his memoir. So the last chapter, migrants begins in Paris. And you have, as the first protagonist, the Jews, the escaped the catastrophe of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire during the end of the First World War. You know, when the First World War ended, all the great empires of Europe collapsed. The German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire collapsed simultaneously. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was particularly important to the history of the Mediterranean, because it was a place where many nations were allowed, but no nationalism. So there were many languages, many groups, especially Jewish people, where had a possibility of living with much less pressure than in other parts of Europe, in Germany, for example, in Russia or in France, was much worse. And the empire collapsed. You had a generation of writers that tried to reinvent the empire while migrating everywhere, some to Brazil, like Stephensdijk, some to France, like Josef Roth, who is the protagonist of the beginning of this chapter. And they reinvent through nostalgia. This world, there may be never was. But by reinventing it, by using their nostalgia productively, they created a blueprint of how that world could have been, or maybe should have been. Or maybe the world could be. So starting from then, I go all the way to contemporary migrants today, looking at the attempts in the contemporary age to escape the catastrophes of nationalism and the crushing movement of the wheels of history. It bookends in part with a fictional, actually fictional account in which we meet some that lesser known but wonderful thinkers of the 20th century, but it truly ends in front of the center for the detention of migrants. In a undisclosed location in the Mediterranean, you have places like that in Greece, Spain, in Italy. Because it is there within that center that the next chapter of this book is being written right now. The book is fantastic. And in fact, I want to dig into some of the points that you brought up. Maybe I'll move backwards in fact, I'd like to pick up on what happens in the migrants chapter featuring the account of Yosuf Roth. And there you describe two very different kinds of nostalgia. And maybe I'll qualify this by saying that this is going to be a topic that we're going to pick up this weekend on a live stream that we do on acid horizon. It's actually the topic of one of our very first courses that we're doing with the acid horizon research commons. And it's also a timely topic because let's face it here in the United States where I live, nostalgia has been a great driver in the politics that now are part, sadly part of our current hegemony. And you know, with that in mind, what we were running right up against, I think one of the challenges of doing a podcast like left hand, which is how do we stage an encounter with things like myth, nostalgic thinking and so forth with a mind for liberation, with a mind for anti capitalist struggle and so forth in a way that doesn't drag the present backward and superimpose upon it the dead forms of the past. But when we look at the case of Yosuf Roth, he does something quite different. His longing for the Austro-Hungarian world is full of melancholy, but it generates a different kind of ethical sensibility than something like make America great again. So maybe you could help us parse the two different kinds of orientations towards nostalgia that you put forward in the book. Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, in one of the very few hints to the very contemporary current affairs that are in the book, one of the very few is a reference to the make America great again slogan. As the exact opposite of the idea of nostalgia, inertia by the Jewish practice of the lost Austrian-Garian world, I distinguish between two forms of nostalgia in the way that in the first chapter I distinguish between two forms of hopelessness and hopefulness. So there's nostalgia as a project and nostalgia as a projection. Nostalgia as a project is make America great again. So is a form of nostalgia that is entirely fantastical is an imaginary creation. It refers to a world that never really was, but is ashamed of its being fantastical and imaginary and it tries to create that world to collapse the imaginary onto the world and to make it material as if only the material had the right to citizenship in the world. The result is there's a called Prokustian bed. The story of the Prokustian bed is a bed used by this ancient Greek bandit. Prokustus who used to lie as victims on a bed and then if the victim was a bit longer than the bed would cut the feet shorter, it would stretch it. Okay? Until Heracles defeated him and that imposed the same penalty on him. So the result of make America great again is in order to recreate this fantasy concretely and materially, you destroy as much as you can. You unleash a wave of destruction. The Austrian-Garian writers that I look at were very different. They never had a plan to recreate the old world into the present. They had a very different metaphysics of time and a very different metaphysics of possibility. They thought that not only the actual exists, not only the things that you see material around the self exist, but also the infinite possibilities that were never actualized, the things that could have been but never were actually. In fact exist. Truly exist. The truly exist just as much as the others. They have a right to sit in a ship ontologically as the others. This is something developed, for example, by Robert Musi in a book The Men Without Qualities. They tried to put on trial not the present to change it, but history to reclaim a space outside of the hegemonic construction of reality, the hegemonic construction of the world that goes down in history as history. History is the recording fundamentally of the hegemonic ways of making sense of reality. But all the others, they do not enter history. The fight is not for them to enter history, but to reclaim the fact that outside of history there is a huge valley where many worlds exist simultaneously. That's nostalgia as a projection. The past is reinvented because the past is simultaneous with the present and it undergoes transformations. While the powerful are able to transform the future, which is their reserve war, their hunting reserve war, for the powerless, the past often is the only place that they can change. But this is not a futile exercise. The past can be changed and can give rise to a different way of existing. We don't exist only in the present. We exist synchronously in all times, past, present, and future are conventions of time-making, time itself being a convention. Life is much broader as a mystery than we pretend it is in our usual ways of sense-making. This strategy of nostalgia is a way of repropriating or making oneself at home in a number of different temporalities and worlds at the same time. Hey, everyone, give me a quick sidebar here that will be less than a minute. I committed myself to punching out this episode early, not only because of how fantastic this interview was, but also because its themes edge up against the politics of nostalgia by Grafton Tanner, which is one of the new courses that we are offering on the acid horizon research comments. We are going to interview Grafton on live stream on Sunday, August 24th. There's a link in the show notes. Also click the acid horizon research comments link also in the show notes to find out more. Let's take a quick look as you're listening and let's get back to the interview. Everything that you just said right now actually sparked me to have an insight that I had not had before. I'd like to run it by you. One of my upcoming questions was about the approaches to myth, especially when it relates to the politics of liberation, left wing politics broadly construed. From a more traditional or quote unquote materialist perspective, sometimes this work with myth, the politics of the imagination and so forth can be viewed with a heavy skepticism. Let's face it, depending on the left wing political orientation that you consider yourself to be a part of, liberation demands solid ground, seizing the means of production, reorganizing social relations, rejecting what looks like mysticism or irrationality. There's a way in which even make America great again participates in this kind of brute materialism that you're talking about because like you're saying, it's trying to crush the imaginary by enacting a kind of referendum on the past. From this angle, myth can seem like a dangerous detour for some, you know, too unstable, too easily co-opted by the right too far from material struggle. How is it then that we can justify an approach to dealing with myth that's not maybe just literary to me, that seems like a cop out because what many of the myths that are featured in other world really address is something wholly ineffable about the cosmos and the very porous nature of existence and experience and the way that that might bring to bear politically speaking. So how do we then navigate the twain of the quote-unquote material struggle and the immaterial struggle to which myth often refers? But this is something, as you say, that it's been hotly debated on the left with various positions, the relationship between the immaterial and the material, the imaginary and the real, so to say. I think there's often been, to my mind, an inversion in the sense that often we have discussed how to manipulate the imagination in order to transform material relationships. I see it the other way around and in this way I feel closer to Oscar Wilde's essay, The Soul of Men and the Socialism in which he said the socialism was necessary and seizing the means of production was necessary as it is very much, you know, also today and making sure that every person as older material needs met is necessary, but why? It's necessary because that's the only way that allows for every person to live their life as a work of art. So you see the imagination doesn't need to be justified by the material transformation is the other way around. Is art, is imagination, is the imaginary, recreation of the world that justifies the revolution? Is form that perspective? Why? Because if we are thinking of the main challenges of being alive in the world, well we're looking at a very strange situation. We are alive by chance in an infinite universe, the void of meaning in the way we understand the term meaning. Mystic would agree on this, of course there is no meaning, we understand it. And one of the main challenges we have is to survive this, to survive being throwing to chaos with very little to navigate our experience. Doing this making sense of life and avoiding killing oneself before you die, which is not a great challenge, requires an enormous effort at the imaginative level. This enormous effort of making sense while at the same time not forgetting that whatever sense you make is a fictional sense that we live by myths and fictions. And myths are always with us because the myth is a way of making sense of an infinite, ungraceable reality in a much reduced form, in a narrative form, a way we can digest. But at the same time the myth is aware of this, is aware of being a myth. There is a character in the third chapter that talks about it's very beautiful, Salus. In order to do this, you need to have a number of material conditions met. This is what defines a dignified life, not just having a ball over ice a day, but being put in the condition to be a mystic and a philosopher. That's what we should strive for. Because that's the only way in which we are capable of living without pretending not to be alive, which is a solution of entertainment and overwork, or without killing ourselves, or without distracting ourselves with crazy plans of destruction, which is another popular sport nowadays. So yeah, I turn it in this way. I am aware, of course, that from a certain part of the left there is great skepticism towards fantasy, towards escapeism, because there is an idea that is within history that the process of historical materialism takes place according to a hagelian view of how history proceeds and so on and so forth. That's one strand of the left. The left is very broad. There's many solutions from the utopian socialist to the individualists and anarchists. There's much more than that. Of course, from historical materialism, we can take very important, often very important strategic lessons, as well as very important insights into political economy. Very important. I don't think we should take it as a dogma 100%. So if the Italian Communist Party, the 1960s, didn't listen to Wagner, because Wagner was a Nazi author or didn't read Nietzsche, that was their mistake. It was a mistake. You should read Nietzsche. You should listen to Wagner. Wagner is a wonderful musician and he is an incredible philosopher and writer. So we shouldn't kind of orchestrate the range of our imagination in the name of a totally Germany of the material. The material is service of the material. There's a quote that really stands out to me that we encounter on page 137 of the book. And I'm going to get into the weeds a little bit sort of metaphysically, psychologically here. You wrote that mythic stories belong to an other world, beyond space and time whose reverberations appear here in our everyday world. Like the light of distant stars, the eternal actions of gods and heroes are visible to us only faintly and myth is the sole form in which humans can communicate them. You go on to say then that mythic stories resembled the eternal laws of mathematics. They are here with us, yet they are irreducible to what we can see of them. They run alongside the flow of time. And when they enter the present, they emerge like messengers from an invisible elsewhere. And previously in the context of this conversation, you mentioned that we are living past, present and future all simultaneously in some sense. And there's a seeming paradox here at one level, there's something about this reality that escapes us that remains constantly ineffable. Yet you suggest that the mythical can appear to us maybe in sort of blips or fragments in our life, or maybe it comes at us just like a massive shard or a boulder if we want to run it that way. But how do you see, for example, and I like James Hillman. James Hillman has been a figure or a teacher that I have attached myself to and the notion of immersing oneself in psyche and articulating the beauty, seeing through images in the world and drawing that out. That has been a sort of refrain in my own encounter with myth and maybe just a little bit of a personal narrative. I've been on both sides of the fence a couple of times in my life. I started out thinking mythologically. I then came to a point in my own political development where maybe I was on the side of those who were more like the Higalians, like we said. And now I've more or less returned to a position that I think is familiar to yours. And I have my own way of encountering that sort of mythic dimension of life in the everyday. But how is it that you see it? How is it that the sort of ineffable character or texture of the cosmos appears to us in the everyday? And how does it appear for you, Federico Campania, every day? We're surrounded by myths. But well, we are myths, as Salos would say, that the world itself is a myth. There's a visible part and there is an invisible part. But also we are self-submits. Because if I go around and I tell somebody, I am Federico. This is clearly not true. I am not Federico. So Federico is a story, is a fictional character linguistically created that makes sense only within a fictional framework. So a framework that is conventional and doesn't have objective basis in observatory reality. Okay. So Federico is a fictional character. Federico is a myth. You are a myth. Each one of us is a myth. But equally a glass is a mythological production. There is no such thing as a glass of water here on the table in reality. Okay. It's a way in which we dissect the infinite continuum of matter, matter itself being a myth. In a particular way, in order to make sense of it and to interact with it according to certain rules that we have riskalled. But in itself the object glass is not a spontaneous object of reality. It is a mythological invention, it is a fictional narrative linguistic invention to which we relate in a particular way and to which other people in other civilizations, other people with neurodifferent, neurodifferences to each other relate differently. Okay. It's not the same. This is something discussed in anthropology as perspectivism, how different forms of awareness inhabit different worlds one next to the other. So, we are surrounded by myths. However, the real lesson of mythology is that myths know that they are myths. A myth doesn't present itself as the absolute truth. Proof is that mythological stories are narrated in many different variations and there was never any problem with that. Okay. The same exact mythological story has five different endings and they're all okay. The God can have six different names and they're still the same God and be venerated in different civilizations and different things. A myth knows that it's a myth and because a myth is aware that a human being or a being endowed with awareness, which includes many other life forms, but I can speak only for my fellow humans. So being endowed with awareness is like a lighthouse that views the horizon up to the curve. Okay. And not beyond the curve. That doesn't mean that there is nothing beyond the curve. There is infinitely more beyond the curve of the horizon. But that's what we can see. Now how can we write a geography of this world that we see up to the curve of the horizon while at the same time not pretending that that's where reality ends mythologically? That's the only way you can do it. With a language that contains within itself, it's negation. It constantly says yes, but this is a story. Yes, but not really. Not really, not absolutely really. This is important and is exactly the opposite of what we're doing today. Okay. So today, for example, with the rise of, well, with the rise of nationalism, we have people talking about things like the United States of America, which things that don't exist. Okay. These are fictions. Okay. They're inventions exactly like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. They're ontologically, they're exactly on the same plane as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And on the base of these fictions, they create a bureaucracy, they issue dictates, they create police forces, they kill, they imprison, they render impossible, they create, they imagine a recreation of meaning and the free floating within reality to millions of people. That's why we don't remember the distinct needs. And it seems as if the people who employ myth or mythology as a kind of political tool, often do it to upright these images or icons that have a transcendent sovereignty over others. And this is often associated with the far right and the right wing generally. But what you're talking about sounds like a kind of anarchy. And I'm getting some inflection. I am an artist. Of course you are as I am. And we've talked about your book Technic and Magic and I'm familiar with your book The Last Night, which we put out with a publisher with whom we were previously associated. But I would actually like to talk about the intersection of your anarchist commitments with mythology itself. I mean, we've already fleshed a little bit of that out here, but maybe there's something more definitive that you can say. How is it that you validate your commitment to mythology via your anarchism or vice versa? Well, one thing that you get, usually in anarchism is the critical part, the parst dense trends that is called in old rhetoric. So the part where you destroy some of existing conventions. And so you go through the destruction of a number of things. You do, what Nietzsche calls the "Eginiology of morals" but also of forms of power of imaginary creations. You do something similar to what Max Turner did in his book The Egonizon. So you take all these ideas that weigh onto your head like spooks and you destroy them. So definitely I think this exercise of questioning whether the nation truly exists, maybe it doesn't. The family is a real natural thing or no, it's actually a performative creation like gender, like money and so on and so forth. You see, this process, this habit, who aids you to understanding mythological language. You finally read myths and you're like, "I, yes, of course, these people, these people write from this position, not from not from the position of the person that believes in an exaggerated way the reality of their fantasies. Believing in your fantasies is important to the extent to which it keeps them up. So you have to suspend your disbelief enough, for example, to be able to go out of the house and say, "I am Federico." But if you suspend this belief too much and you start believing that I am Federico, okay, this is a catastrophe. So anarchism always has a connection with mystical movements and mysticism always has a connection with mythology. Because mythology is propodetic, it takes you there. It's a passage towards. This is something described and discussed interestingly, for example, by Pavel Florenski, a great mathematician, inventor, art historian, orthodox priest, mystic and so on and so forth from Russia. How there is a connection between this abituation to the invisible, to the failures of language through me that takes you towards an ecstatic experience of reality in itself. So this is the main way in. Anarchism also means that there is no archa. So anarcha, the word itself means without archa, but this is very, very interesting. What does archa means in Greek? That means many different things. Monarchie, the power of the monos, the archa of the monos. But it also means origin. So the first Greek philosophers before Socrates were known as the Friso-Cratics, were known as the ones that investigated the problem of the archa, what is the fundamental ingredient that creates reality? And you had people like Thales saying it's water or they're saying it's the infinite or is fire and so on and so forth. An anarchist says that there is no archa. What does this mean? There is of course an archa. So there is, of course, the bedrock of reality, the fundamental fact of reality being there. But this being with the capital B, as Heidegger suggests, is not being with a small B. So the archa existence, the fact that things are is beyond any single thing that exists, is beyond any possible definition, is they inestable. So it's something beyond the grasp of our minds and at the same time is the stuff that makes up our minds. So you see, you have a dislocation of the archa as origin and power outside of the world. There is a fundamental legitimacy ontologically to things, but it's in nobody's hands. It's always already there, always already there, rhymes with always already saved. This is also a tradition in religion called apocatastasis and is the tradition according to which there is no salvation at the end of times, but things are always already saved since the beginning is particularly prominent in Christianity, but not only you find it also in Buddhism, for example. This is connected with anarchism as I have described it because the dignity of things, the fundamental ontological dignity of things is given as a granted. It's not something that you have to fight for. It's not something that you have to reaffirm is the foundation. It's the original state, but not original in a chronological sense. We have to go back to the original times, the cavemen and so on, but originally in the sense that at every moment things already are saved, things already have equal dignity ontologically. And you use this not so much as an end point for your political action. You use this as a starting point for your political action. This gives rise to a form of politics that is known as prefigration. Prefigration means to live as if already, so to say the revolution had happened. You are already from that perspective. This is typical of some forms of anarchism. I would say of most forms of anarchism. Now I know that in the United States there is a particular strand of anarchism, which is the liver, I don't know how you guys call it, the anarcho-capicists. The libertarianism and anarcho-capitalists. I think you can appreciate immediately how the reference to apocatastases and things being all always already saved and always already originally provided with the same dignity goes in entirely opposite direction to an anarcho-capitalism, or which salvation is always at stake and you always have to reaffirm it or you risk losing it and becoming nothing. You cannot become nothingness is impossible as parmened as said. Now as an anarchist reading this particular book, one of the challenges is encountering a figure like Alexander for example, or any of the great conquers and seeing them in a positive light. But of course, we know that history is essentially an ongoing transformation and reshaping of values. But I will say that something happened for me in the reading of this particular book at various points where I believe it's Julian the apostate or maybe even Menander where we have figures who attempted to constitute power in a way that invited a kind of pluralism, a kind of openness to their society that eventually found its own catastrophe at the end. And reading this book is a kind of meditation in these tiny surges of hopefulness, emerging out of these figures that in many cases I'd ordinarily be at odds with and then seeing their project completely fall apart and being returned to myself and my values and watching it happen all over again. So there's a kind of cyclical quality which I think addresses this broader theme of how do we handle the ongoing or impending catastrophe? What is not only our political orientation towards it, but how can we marshal the imaginative resources to live and thrive amidst collapse? Okay, well, it is important to do collective work and definitely it's important to create movements that are capable of opposing some historical transformations at this moment. Organization is certain important. I just don't write about this. So this is just something that it is important, but it's not something that I am looking at particularly. So my opinions on this strategic aspect of organization I think are not particularly of value. I focus more on the problem of how the individual can survive this. I have a particular fascination with the position of the individual because the individual in the vast majority of cases, the near the tide of cases is entirely at the mercy of greater forces than he, more or more, or themselves. The forces of society, the forces of culture, the forces of the so-called past, the forces of the future, even worse than the forces of the past, the forces of history. So I look very much at the examples of the single individual stuck in a state of powerlessness. So in terms of the collective organization, I cannot offer much advice. Maybe if we have, if we grab the beer together, we can talk about that. But the level of the individual in a way, this book and also my previous books, but this one in particular, function a little bit like the kind of genre, literary genre that was quite popular in the Middle Ages and in the early modernity called mirrors for princes. Because for princes were books about vice to princes on how best to rule and run their kingdoms. I write mirrors for plebs because I'm not prince and I'm a blood. So for individual people in the plebs, like myself. And in this way, exactly like in the mirrors for princes, characters like Alexander the Great, Menander, Julian, apostate, Josef Roth, Alba Muni, Zgabesadevaka, and many, many other characters that you find in the book, perform a similar function to the exemplar that they used to use in the mirrors for princes. They are more or less real examples of exemplary behaviors. Are they entirely real? Was Menander the Hellenistic King of a kingdom in what was called at the time India? He's basically in Afghanistan. Who promoted Buddhism were at the same time speaking Greek. Is Menander exactly as we find him in a book like the Meal in the Panas or in the Extent Records of it, the way that I presented is not invented. I presented according to the letter of the texts that we have. But these texts are the trans-worthy. Does it matter? It does, to a certain extent, because they provide us with models, they provide us with inspirations. They provide us with possibilities, and possibilities are very important. Possibilities are very, very important. So it's a book full of possibilities, for them each or to survive times of catastrophes. The solutions, many, I tend to present the different solutions on a kind of equal grounding and an equal level. For example, in the section on late antiquity, I present all the different ways in which the minoritarian forces crushed under the rise of Christianity tried to make sense of their defeat, and they are very different. For the hermitists, for example, the solution was to realize that they themselves were already gods. That actually they were immortal. That actually nobody had power over them. That the threats, that power launched against them had no real bite. But the Nostics said, "No, the world is hell. We are stuck in hell. We need to escape, and thus we need to sabotage the world. We need to destroy laws. We need to destroy reproduction, the family, society, the economy." So they are very, very different. I suggest to look at all these different options and pick and choose and try them out. The main suggestion, however, that runs throughout the book is to keep in mind that even though it is a horrible and often lethal dream, history is still a dream. It can be lethal and it can destroy lives, but it can never debate the essential dignity of every being. This is, I think, an important starting point, especially if you have no hope of changing your material condition in the immediate present. Yes, you must fight to change your material conditions as part of an organized group, as part of an individual through peaceful or non-peaceful means, however you want. But meanwhile, it's important that you try not to be existentially destroyed entirely, convinced that you are nothing. So I try to help at that level. It's only one step, and it's only one brick. But I think it's a brick that is often overlooked, especially on the left. Especially on the left, we put too much emphasis on the rest, which is important, but our militants, our troops, however you want to call them, are individual people in very difficult situations, and most of us will not see the revolution. And is our way to annihilate ourselves in the meantime? How can we survive this? That's what the book is about. Well, that makes me think there's a very important immediate lesson, I think, that we can pull even from this conversation that I think is relevant, especially to the left as they interact online today. The left online, and I'm specifically saying online because I'm not talking about the organized left parties or what have you, is that sometimes the. The fractured nature of what we would call the left broadly construed is divided up into essentially literary or theoretical clicks, where some groups are dismissive of other groups' concerns, sometimes for good political reasons, other times for not-so-good ones. And at one level, the corpus of a particular click can become the grounding for a kind of iron clad or absolute law of what perhaps political organizing should look like. And without a doubt, there's a mythological or imaginal character which informs those tendencies. But what you're putting forward here in this ensemble of figures that we see in other worlds, I like what you say is like find something in there that stands out to you that really sort of pokes at your individual psyche. And what does that do for you to allow your imagination to unfold for you to steal yourself against catastrophe for you to find your friends and find others and survive in this world as it is? And with that in mind, here's an important question given everyone that you've put forward in other worlds, which particular figure in here stands out to you, Federico, who is your guiding light in other worlds? They're all my children. So I can't choose. I shouldn't force you to. Should that be a secret? Well, no, well, there's many characters. There's the heroes of the borderland ethics. We didn't talk about them, but there's this kind of far west kind of epics in Syria, in the Middle Ages, and the heroes are incredible. There are people like Roberto Calasso, definitely not a left-wing man, but a fantastic intellectual from Italy in the 20th century. There are so many. I was Joseph Roth to whom I personally enamored literally. I find this prose enchanting. So it's difficult for me to choose, but maybe the one that I find the most powerful is a collective author. Their narration is, I actually took months to rewrite it in the book, and I'm talking about the nostics. So just two words about the nostics. The nostics are not a group. The nostics were a constellation of small communities and individuals that in late antiquity, so before the beginning of the Middle Ages conventionally and before the end of antiquity conventionally, in the area of Egypt, the Middle East, more or less, but then spreading throughout the Mediterranean world, were engaged in this reinvention of reality. They believed, well, we didn't know what they believed until 1945. We only knew that the Christians hated them, and the pagans also didn't like them. So we have a philosopher like Plotinus writing a text against the nostics, and many writers in Christianity writing texts against the nostics. They were a big danger. They were very popular, but we lost all their literature. When we found it, we found a number of codexes and a number of scrolls that brought back one of the most visionary literary legacies ever. They reinvent the history of the universe, and they explain how there is another universe beyond this universe, and a part of that universe fell out of its own mistake and produced an abortion within herself. There's some aspects of gender here that are very complicated. This abortion became alive and became God, and this God is the God of the Bible. The Bible is the book of the crimes of God. The Bible is true, but can't you read it? That God is horrible. Because that God tried to destroy the legacy of the original God, the spark of light, and that is our soul. And so God killed Jesus. God tried to destroy the spark of light by destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, where we nostics were back in the days. I can't summarize it now. It did take me months to read all the codexes and put together different versions into one semi coherent narrative. By the way, this is the only available version of the as a coherent narrative. Of course, I had to select and read just because they are different to the accounts, but I tried to put it together into one story. That I have to say is the one that struck me the most, not the one I believe into the most, but literally I found it wonderful. Great. Well, let's wrap this up. I have one more question to close us out. So if the Mediterranean imagination teaches anything to anyone about survival, metamorphosis or solidarity, what lesson do you hope that readers carry with them from other worlds into the crises of our own time? Well, as I was saying, there are many lessons to keep in mind for the crisis of our own time, and other worlds does not provide them all. Definitely not. It does provide some, however. One lesson is that some practices that have a bad name, such as treason, desertion, dropping out this loyalty, this simulation are fundamental to surviving in times in which you are so minoritarian that you are threatened with annihilation. The book talks about many of these practices. I was mentioning the Marrano's, for example, but also many other heroes of the Mediterranean history. So to keep in mind that the arsenal at our disposal is greater than the mere arsenal of how to seize power. There is also an arsenal at our disposal in times of defeat. And the other is to not believe excessively in anything and not disbelieve excessively anything. To ground the right to citizenship at a nontological level to all things, there are an aren't from our own perspective because our perspective is so tiny. That all possibilities simultaneously exist, that past the present and the future simultaneously exist. That time itself being an invention does not define the temporality of our existence. But at the same time, the tools that we use to navigate our life, which are linguistic tools, are necessary. We need to nurture them, but we should not fall into the trap of believing them to be absolutely real. And the last thing is that you are not alone. And you have many comrades that have been fighting and are fighting your same struggle exactly on your term. Just in another era, in another part of the world. The fact that they lived 2000 years ago doesn't mean that they're less relevant to you today or less close to you today than somebody next to you. So look around, look around in history, look around in space and time, and you will find that you're very much not alone. You have many friends. So you have an esoteric circle, an esoterism. And this circle is made of people in the flesh and people without flesh. Well Federico, thank you. You are in the flesh. You are in our circle. And we want to say thank you for getting us other world's Mediterranean lessons on escaping history from Bloomsbury. It's out now. So go ahead and purchase it wherever you purchase books or commit some sort of crime. That would allow you to procure the book. Yeah, steal this book. Happy walk months. That may or may not go into the episode, but thank you very much. Craig, thank you very much. It's been a real pleasure and good luck with everything in the US or that thing known as the US. Thank you so much again Federico. And just as a reminder, this episode was both featured on the acid horizon podcast and the left hand podcast. But most importantly, it is all part of the acid horizon research comments. I just want to say thank you to everybody who has supported us on Patreon, supported left hand on Patreon. We encourage you to continue your support and one of the ways that we want to continue to help our former guests, scholars, philosophers, authors, just like Federico, like Stuart Kendall, like Jessica Albert Decker, like Jules Gleason is that we have now created a platform that's going to allow our vast network of scholars and contributors to teach classes with us. 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