“Developing a familiarity with the past truly enriches our experience of living and can really give us some incredible tools for facing these impossible challenges that we have to face.”

 I am very excited to share this conversation with the brilliant and passionate thinker, storyteller, and Italian Philosopher Federico Companga! In this episode, Federico discusses the role of imagination, nostalgia, storytelling, solidarity, and anarchism in creating new worlds. He emphasizes the importance of metaphysical inquiry and the need to reimagine reality. We dive into many other topics from mysticism to what is existence? what it means to be a migrant and find belonging. And the rise of reactionary politics at this time of collapse and unfolding disasters… and more! Much of the conversation stems from Federico’s new fabulous book, Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History.

(warning: I say beautiful a lot in this episode, because, well his ideas and stories are BEAUTIFUL!!!)

Federico is also the author of Prophetic Culture: recreation for adolescents (Bloomsbury: 2021), Technic and Magic: the reconstruction of reality (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Last Night (Zero Books, 2013). Federico lives in London.

Federico Campagna's Work

Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons On Escaping History: Federico Campagna

Pushing Through Portals by calm.

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Show music by: AwareNess

Tech and Show Art: Chris Bergman

carla joy bergman

Thanks for listening!

hello, I'm carla, and welcome to Walking With Change. Before we get to today's episode, I have a tiny bit of housekeeping and a bit of an intro to share with you all. First of all, I now run the podcast through my collaborative worker run project called CAW, so if you want to support this show, you can become a member over at cawshinythings.com, and thank you. Also, at the end of this episode, I will be sharing a truly magical and very complimentary song for this episode. It's called Braiding the Timelines, and it's from the new wonderful, calm. album called Pushing on Portals. Very timely for this time of year, thanks to chris and AwareNess for letting me share their song. I also want to give thanks to my awesome tech genius, Chris Bergman. And last but not least, thank you all for listening. All the links to the above mentioned, plus the episode in general will be in the show notes.

So well, I took a year off from making the show and it's just really great to be back. I had to take a break because my life was catapulted into a wild storm, many storms, really, of too many changes at once. So you could say it was the kind of changes you scream through, maybe rather than walk with. So you know, the bottom line is, I didn't, didn't create a lot in the last year, but it's really good to be here. But one of the things that I was dealing with was cognitive disabilities, I guess, and they're still it's that's still at play, but I'm trying to push myself a little bit and get back to my work, and it's just made me think a lot about disability justice and care around brain disabilities. And you know what type of minds are welcomed on these types of platforms, but that's for a different time and a different episode. Yes, so during these personal storms, though, and of course, witnessing the ongoing disasters and just just the horse all around us, I found myself feeling more and more uncertain about what I know and what I believe in, but at the same time, I felt this kind of rootedness, I guess, like a deeper understanding in the idea that we need to think more together so we can come up with new questions or new stories, really, because the same old ones used in the past aren't really helping today. It kind of reminds me of what Donna Haraway says, you know, it matters what stories make worlds. What worlds make stories. It matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with. So as I walk within a kind of chaos Chamber of ideas these days, I found myself reading more philosophy, and in particular metaphysics. I was drawn to reading and learning from one philosopher in particular this past year, and he just happens to be my wonderful guest. Today, I am excited to share this conversation I had with the brilliant and passionate thinker, storyteller and Italian philosopher Federico Campagna. Federico's work revolves around the metaphysical aspects of imagination and the possibility of modifying the present quote, "reality system". In the show, he talks about the role of imagination, nostalgia, storytelling, solidarity and anarchism in creating new worlds, particularly in times of collapse and unfolding endings and beginnings, and really how we can pull necessary lessons from the past, from history, much of his conversations come from his truly remarkable new book titled "Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History". Okay, let's get into it.

Thank you for being here Federico. It's such a delight to meet you. Been a big fan for a while, yeah,

Thank you, carla, for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, thank you. So there's so much terrain in the Federico world, and I'm going to try to keep this an hour so i am going to focus primarily on your newest book, which I'll introduce in a bit. But first I want to kind of step back a bit. You know, at this time of urgency and increased disasters and ongoing fascism and genocides and wars and catastrophes unfolding climate catastrophes unfolding everywhere, I have found that when I connect with my like, fellow organizers and anarchists, like globally, like we have, like a support group, I'm always pushing for them to think about the world metaphysically, and that has a lot to do with you. You've really influenced me to think about it that way. And I just want to thank you. So with that in mind, I guess I would love it if you could share a bit about what, like, what your practice is and why you explore metaphysics, and maybe you know philosophy more broadly, yeah, and like, what are the guiding questions that you work with?

To be honest, I couldn't say precisely why I started doing philosophy. Maybe that's common to many people doing philosophy, but I do remember why I started looking into metaphysics more particularly, and that has to do with politics. I noticed after a long string of defeats, they've experienced already at a very young age as an anarchist activist, that it seemed to me that it was impossible for us to win, and I was wondering why we could not win. And I started wondering maybe if the case was that we couldn't win because it was truly impossible, as in in the structure of the world as we understood it, not just the social configurations and the institutions, but the very imagination we had of the world. Our possibility of victory was impossible, so what we had to do was transforming the world from scratch, I thought. For as long as we consider things according to the metaphysics so to the imagination about this, the nature of reality that is prevalent today, many of our battles are destined to meet a defeat. I'm thinking, for example, in when we one of the things that in that shocked me already many years ago was when here listening to debates about whether the migrants were good or bad for the economy. And I realized that for as long as we started, we continued engaging in this conversation. We were on a terrain where we would never be able to get out of the idea that things are allowed to exist to the extent to which they are good or bad for the economy, we had to shift completely the understanding of what makes something worthy of being preserved, worthy of existing or legitimated into existing. But these questions are not political questions, these questions are metaphysical questions. What do we understand as existence? To what extent do we decide what is legitimately existing or not, and to what extent actually is maybe just an objective fact? These are all metaphysical questions, more specifically, ontological questions having to do with existence. From there, I moved on, and I tried to imagine the kind of reality, idea about reality, where some of the things that I wanted to see around myself in the world would become possible. And then I moved on to the idea of the possible and the impossible and so on and then that's the line of my work.

Thank you. That's beautiful. I love that it's grounded in politics and like you know, wanting to see a change happening, and I agree with you. Okay, let's talk about your new book. It is titled Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History, and it's out by by Bloomsbury Berry, right? Just came out just this past June. Well, first of all, I love, love, love this book. I have read the intro a few times, and everyone in my orbit has had to hear me read it out loud to them. I think it's really right on time. And, yeah, it's just this blending of genre the way you approached it so poetically, narratively, there's philosophy, there's there's fiction, there's history, and I really believe it's for all ages, which really matters to me, like I would read it to anybody. And I think that's also a beautiful gift. I really have never it's really quite remarkable. Federico. I've never actually come across a book quite like it. I also think it's the content itself, the lessons which we'll get into are really necessary right now. Yeah, I guess I'm curious to hear about the process of writing. I know it started a long time ago. And, you know, like, because basically it the right the storytelling style, like the methodology, mirrors what's in it. So it's very it's very meta. You get the experience. And so I'm curious about that, like that process, where that comes from? What are some of your inspirations, including, I would really love to hear how your wonderful son, Arturo, inspired you as a storyteller, and it has has taught you some lessons.

Yeah. Well, thank first of all, thank you for your very kind words on the book. I'm happy that you like it. It's a bit different from the other things I've written so far. So I'm, I'm happy that you think it worked. I was even before you were you mentioned him, I was going to say that the real inspiration for the style of the text has been Arturo, who's my son, who is 11 years old. He's been training me in storytelling because his school is really quite far from our home, so we take about an hour to get there, a bit longer. And over the years, this hour on the bus, and then on the train, then on the bus again, and so on. I was asked to improvise stories, so I improvised various epics. One of them is called the Children's Revolution. Is an ongoing saga that is almost finished now, I think so we have a number of sagas. Now, unfortunately, because he is older and he goes to secondary school, he travels mostly on his own, so I think I will need some more training somewhere else, maybe at home. Inventing stories on the spot is a very good gym for storytelling. And having somebody that corrects you, if the story is like maybe getting boring, or maybe like this character, I don't want it like this and so on, is really good. Another thing that helped me was trying with him things like dangerous and dragons or Hero Quest they have a like games that have a heavy element of storytelling, that's also really important and inspirational for me. Often with Arturo, when I try to write something for children, which is another project that I have on the side at the moment, I asked him to edit it. So, and it's really very difficult writing for for children, because children kind of buy the bullshit a lot less than adults, so you need to be really on, it is really difficult, like they have less tolerance for bad writing or for bad rhythm. So I'm finding it quite complicated, it's quite a tough judge anyway, so maybe one day I will learn to write for children. And then you were asking about the writing method. Well, the writing method, on the one hand, has some positive aspects, and on the other has some negative aspects. The positive aspect is that I usually try to visualize in my mind an ideal reader. And so when I write, I always imagine as if I was telling this thing to somebody specific. I teach a lot, and my my parents also teachers. I come from a family, partly of teachers, and so this idea of like explaining things to somebody younger than you is always been a guiding light. So I always try to avoid jargon. Also, in previous books, I noticed that jargon is a temptation that you have, especially when you're not very good at writing, and so I'm learning to write better, and hopefully, as I become a better writer, I will use, potentially, maybe zero jargon at some point. The one of the positive aspects of that I'm that I use this does the idea of listening to what I write. I sometimes use an electronic voice that you find on I think also more documents is a crappy voice, but it gives you an idea of like, how it sounds. And I listen to it once, and then I listen to it again while washing dishes, because I try to hear if it sounds okay, even when you're distracted, as most people are when they read. The negative is the fact that I have multiple jobs, and that means that I have very little time, and so writing happens when I can, which is frustrating. And it's not just a matter of time, just a matter of energy, concentration -- I'm not 20 years old anymore, unfortunately. So after 10 hours of work, I'm not like sharp like an arrow, and then like I can write, doesn't work like that. And I stopped taking recreational drugs a while ago, so also that kind of assistance is no longer available, and so when I can.

oh, wow, thank you for sharing that. And yeah, I love that you are. I would love to hear that story, the children's revolution. I hope that happens is that the kids book?

The Children's revolution, is this ongoing saga of these kids. They take over the school, and then from there, in a Trotskyist manner, they try to spread the revolution everywhere. But a few of them become Stalinists. I mean, they try to become dictators. It's a long story.

Oh, sounds wonderful. I listened to your podcast when you had your wonderful son on and he gave such good, good advice for how to write a story. And he was like, six years old at the time. It was, it was incredible. I also just for transparency, also collaborate and learn from my kids, who are both adults now, but like I found your work through my 31 year old who I trust, like he's always telling me what philosophy to read and who to read and who to engage with, and so, yes, it continues. Is my point. If that that relationship is intact, it's like

I should ask him some advice. I'm also always on the lookout for new things.

Yeah, totally, yeah. So I'm wondering, I think I asked you ahead of time I was going to read a passage from your book, but I'd love it if you could read a passage from your new, fabulous book Otherworlds, just to sort of set the stage. A little bit.

sure.So you asked me to read a passage from the introduction, and it's towards, I think, well, midway towards the end is one page:

"The peoples of the Mediterranean had to face a long series of such traumatizing events, accompanied by material disasters, like wars, famines and plagues."

By the way, at this point I was talking about how the civilizations of the Mediterranean knew moments of splendour and then inevitably collapsed. I'll continue

"In response to the cyclical a pocket to these cyclical apocalypses, they devised a range of radical strategies of survival whenever historical upheavals laid waste to their material and immaterial world. Many of them decided to migrate in search of an elsewhere that would allow their life to flourish once more. They moved through space like the economic migrants, of which my family and I are also examples. But most importantly, they moved beyond space and time outside the confines of history, instead of clinging to the values of a vanishing world or embracing those of the new rising powers, they dare to migrate to the ground zero of the imagination, where ideas and values can be extracted anew from the infinite virtuality of the possible. These deserters from history had to face the hostility both of those who remained attached to the old world and of those heralding the triumph of a new order, their quest to invent a different reality was often a solitary adventure, and even when they managed to congregate in groups, most of their sailings ended In shipwreck. History showed little mercy to communities such as the late Pagans of Antiquity, the Manichean's or the Mystic Jews of the Italian Renaissance. They were systematically ground to dust, and their visions failed to prevail as a new common sense about the nature of the world. But despite their defeat, their invention of new cosmos endured as a testament to how a person's vision of the world can be entangled from the dominant social forces and the chaos of reality can be reclothed within narratives that arise from an individual's suffering and desire for life."

Beautiful. That's from the introduction of "Otherworlds: Mediterranean lessons on Escaping History" -- I mean, I was like, This is how I feel right now. I for transparency, and I know he's a good friend and mentor, but I just also had read Bifo's book, recent book, and some of his stuff about the importance of quitting and deserting You know, you offered a roadmap a little bit. So thank you. So yeah, I get sort of riffing off of the migrants. Why do you feel that uncovering and talking about these otherworldly migrants and their beautiful imaginations is important right now? And yeah, I'm just curious if there's some examples of this type of departure from the dominant order or Empire happening today, or that you are witnessing and and if you could speak to, I love this, what you mean by migrant, "migrate to the ground zero of our imagination." That's such beautifully said.

I think it's I think it is important to do this activity of migrating or deserting, for the reasons that we discussed at the very beginning, because that's the way in which is possible to reset completely the political imagination of a certain era, but also individually, is the only way in which, if you are, if you are destined to be defeated, if the sun of the revolution is going to happen the day after tomorrow, and you're not going to see it, then you still have the right to find meaning and joy in your life, even though you will not be on the winning side of history. Politically, I have examples. There are countless examples. Of course, in the book, I trace many examples that don't necessarily end in political victory, because my focus is more on the individual, but we we've had many examples that did happen in political did result in political victory. Thinking, for example, of feminism, or queer theory and queer movements. T he way in which feminism understood what a woman is already in the 20th century, and then queer movements understood what gender is late in the 20th century, was not just a political movement, but was also a metaphysical movement, because the idea that, for example, a man and a woman are, and the verb is, are so to be, is an ontological statement. They are specific things, depends entirely on the metaphysical imagination of a certain society and also the individuals within the society. Feminism challenged the idea that women where a particular thing and invent and reinvented the notion of what is a woman, which, of course, is a metaphysical invention, in a completely different way which enabled different destinies. The destiny of that metaphysical creation of the 19th century were of a certain kind. If you didn't want those destinies, you would have to create another entity with different destinies. Queer movements, even more interestingly, to my mind, did a meta metaphysical operation by showing that, by showing the fact that all these creations are fundamentally fictional, performative, okay, but performative maybe kind of derails a little bit the attention from the fictional aspect of them. I prefer, Judith Butler talks more about performativity, I prefer to talk more about fictionality. So these are examples that resulted into actual political transformations. But also on the other hand, for example, today, there is on the other side of the of the political divide, so to say, there are attempts at essentializing things like once again and at claiming a particular ontological illegitimacy to entities, for example, the nation or the race. All these such things, which are very interesting. Of course, they are very interesting because they are meta, once again, metaphysical narratives that are competing for political hegemony. What also interests me, and particularly interests me, is the perspective of the individual, especially if you are in a state of utter subjection and minority, and especially if, despite your attempts, your political struggle or individual struggle in the material world does not lead to a change in your material circumstances. And I know this sounds defeatist, but it's a matter of fact that an immense number of people live in this way, and this number of people still have the right to feel that their life was not wasted. This doesn't mean justifying injustice. This injustice is not justified, but it means embodying the position of the defeated. Okay, from this perspective, it must be possible to re understand your own life and your self as a as a being that is endowed with a fundamental dignity that nothing can take away from you. Once again, this is a metaphysical operation, okay? So you will not find your innate worth in overworking. You will not find it in the way you look. You will not find it in any of these things. You will find it in an essential metaphysical investigation what you are, and in in an in an investment of belief, in a certain form of the imagination.

I love that you... This is why I love your work so much, because you're talking about metaphysics and myth and all this, these wonderful non material things in lots of ways, and you just ground it right into this, like beautiful moment and challenging moment, like we're seeing a talk about narratives, like we're seeing a real push to bring the narrative back, like to push back all the work for so long, and kind of like a narrowing down of what modernity was like. Gosh, you said so much. I it's like, how do we, I guess I'm wondering, like, Is it, is it always iterative, or is are is there moments where it's complete? Like, I don't think empire, like, I don't think even the overculture or the hegemonic political is ever complete, there's always cracks. So that's like, my belief system, right there. So flipping that in terms of like metaphysically changing what is reality? Is it ever complete, or is it always in motion?

Hopefully not, hopefully not.

Yeah, it's kind of the same thing. I guess

completing it well, it can feel complete when there is a feeling that you have got it. When you're when there is a feeling that your the narrative you and your end or your group has produced around reality manages to capture exactly the truth about reality. When you think that your understanding of reality is is objective, you feel that it's complete, there's no more work to do you just have to preserve it. That's the definition of ideology. Okay. Ideology is when you naturalize fiction, when you take fiction for nature. So, yeah, I don't think that is ever possible that this ideological twist becomes so majoritarian to the universal. There is always something within us that is incapable of suspending its disbelief towards the fictions that we have. That thing, that skeptical little demon within us, is always a bit dangerous, because if that demon takes over, then you are in trouble. Unless you are a mystic. The Mystic is, of course, the embodiment of that skeptical little demon to the maximum power, abandons all the world's, all the fictions, go straight for the truth, which means annihilation, self annihilation. So unless you have that kind of physique, you should keep an eye on the on the little demon. But nonetheless, it's important to listen to it, because otherwise you become worlded by your world more than you are capable of worlding your world. So you become a product of your own fictional construction. So in the text, for example, in this book, I tried to emphasize this aspect of narrative and fiction to to kind of put forward the idea that these narratives are simultaneously something that we need and something that we should try to remain in control of... so something that we need, but It's also an aspect of the fall to say, theologically, so it's, it's a dangerous thing.

Wow, the work, what you just said about the world, in worlding, becoming that is deep, that's profound. I want to talk about myth, myths and mystics. But before we get there, in the book, you talk about, and this connects to your own story. I was actually in your one of your first books The Last Night you you have a chapter in it about migrant, about yourself, and it really is a beautiful little through line, I think. But you talk about it being kind of this liminal space, like migrants are never they're kind of in this ghostly space. And so, like, can they ever, can you ever find belonging? Or is it a multiplicity of belonging, you know, maybe perhaps across these dimensions. And I'm just, yeah, I was, it was part of, like, it resonated. So it really sparked me. And I'd love to hear more about that.

Well, there's different ways of finding belonging. One of them, it reminds me of an anecdote retold by Bruce Chatwin one day. Bruce Chatwin, famous English writer, travel writer, met this guy who was traveling all the time and didn't have a home, and they had dinner together. And then towards the end of the dinner, he asked him, like, but where is your where is your home actually? Where is where do you think is home? And this guy took the bag he had next to him and opened it, and inside was full of pictures of people he loved. And he said, like, this is my home. So in a way, there is this form of belonging, which is finding affective emotional connections with people and places --these people and places don't necessarily have to be connected with your biography in any objective way you can choose them. So that's that kind of belonging. But I think there's also another kind of belonging that is also open to migrants. Well, the first kind connection with people and places mostly happens within the imagination. So once again, is not particularly material, but the second kind is really entirely disconnected from anything material, and it has to do with ontology, so with questioning the essence of being. I think that in order to be able to to live in general and to to retain an aspect of autonomy within life, one has to feel at home somewhere, but somewhere in a place that is so completely safe from anything that you don't even need to defend it, that you don't need to put a fence or a border around it. This feeling at home, I think, can only be found, but this is a personal belief, it can only be found in the notion of being itself. So understanding, and this is my suggestion, understanding that the fact that you *are* is fundamentally *what you are*. So the fact that you are your being is fundamentally your essence. There is no other essence to you. This essence is what you are. It is also the home from which your activity of worlding emanates, the place from which you move, but you're always there. So this home is constantly, not only with you or and around you, but is you, and it coincides also with the being of everything there is. So it is impossible, to a certain extent, from this perspective, to leave home. So it's impossible to be ejected or to be evicted from your home. There is another order of belonging, the first one is important, of course, the emotional one and so on, but it does have some troubling aspects, for example, the fact that you might become obsessive about protecting it, obsessive about losing it, which is totally understandable. Of course, I'm not saying that we should abandon it together, but all together, but we need to keep an eye on it. But the second type of belonging, I find it more empowering, as they say today, so in the sense that it enables you to live more joyfully.

Yeah, I love that. And like, kind of gets that to that thing and doesn't You can't escape your your home, your home is you, you're always with yourself. That's beautiful,

but also is everything else, because being is the attribute of any of anything there is, material.

Right. Yeah, makes me think of kind of, I guess, just in terms of this whole conversation the mystic and artists, Helma af Klint once said, I'm going to not get, I'm going to paraphrase it, but basically that those who are like have the ability to see beyond form, that's where life is. And I feel like you, you are inviting us into that, that that's that sphere, or that world making our world, building, or worlding through that imagination stuff. And I kind of want to, like, talk a bit about nostalgia. Because, yeah, like, how does it, how does it play a role in these, creating our realities and writing our narratives? And in the book, you said that nostalgia was a project or a projection. Can you speak to that?

Yeah, nostalgia... Well, nowadays, nostalgia is a prevalent emotional form, I would say, in the political debates all over the world, but especially, especially in the West. Nostalgia has a bad name, of course, for various reasons, but I think we shouldn't discard it entirely. There is an aspect of nostalgia that is certainly beneficial. Nostalgia gives you the ability to hallucinate, so you have the ability to disconnect yourself from the present and connect yourself with the past. This especially the first part, disconnecting from the present is important because it teaches you relevant lessons about the metaphysics of time and the notion of eternity. So the fact that time is a way in which we experience change sequentially, so we experience multiple stages in which existence manifests itself. The fact that we experience them sequentially does not necessarily mean that existence also moves sequentially. Imagine that you're looking at your forearm and then you're looking at your elbow, at your wrist, and then at your fist sequentially. The fact that you're moving your gaze sequentially doesn't mean that your elbow disappears when you're looking at the palm of your hand. So nostalgia gives this important lesson, I think. But there are different ways in which we can understand nostalgia. In the book, I was mentioning two. In particular, nostalgia as a project and as a projection. Nostalgia as a project is the typical make X great again. So you have an imagination of something that existed in the past, and you are so convinced that things only truly exist when they are materially embodied in the present and justified and held up by a general political consensus that you take that fantasy and you try to turn it into an actual material reality in the present on which everybody has to agree. So that attempt is typically the kind of like conservative reactionary project today. I looked at the idea of nostalgia as a projection more in the in a field, not of politics, but of literature, and in particular among the writers of the Austro Hungarian empire. Now I imagine that your listeners probably are mostly from North America, so I will not assume that they know about the history of the Austro Hungarian Empire. Once upon a time, up until the 1918 in Europe, there were a number of empires. Two were especially interesting, the Ottoman Empire, centered around today's Turkey, and the Austro Hungarian empire, centered around today's Austria and Hungary. Both these empires were multicultural and multinational and multi faith and multi language. The attribute of the empire, to be honest, almost always, I would say, with very rare exceptions, is this: many peoples are allowed, but no nations. Many faiths are allowed, but no fundamentalisms. This is how empires generally, not always, but generally exist, the Persian Empire in antiquity, the Roman Empire, and the Alexander's Hellenistic empire and so on. They all usually work like this, which is also an interesting thing to keep in mind, considering that the United States presents itself today as a contemporary Empire, but doesn't seem to know exactly how empires work. The Austro Hungarian empire was especially fascinating, I think, because it contained, because, well, it contained within itself, all the main stages where the tragedies of the 20th century really took place, and some of the protagonists, including the Jewish community. Jewish writers, psychoanalysts, scientists and mathematicians, philosophers, play wights, artists, musicians and so on and so forth, of the Austro Hungarian empire the vast majority of the main figures in all of these fields that you will find in the history books. It was an incredible season of culture. And one of the things that all these Jewish writers, artists, philosophers and so on of the time shared was an innate cosmopolitanism now. Cosmopolitanism today has a bad name because there's been a right wing backlash against it, which, by the way, mirrors exactly Nazi propaganda of the 1930s in which the cosmopolitan is, first of all, the Jew, which is at the same time too rich to be trusted and too poor to be trusted, too clever to be trusted and too stupid to be trusted, and so on and so forth. Cosmopolitanism is the refusal of belonging as an exclusive form of existence. Okay, so the fact that you you have to swear allegiance only to one thing you are defined by the community to which you belong. Sorry, this long introduction is to say that after the fall of the Austro Hungarian empire, all these Jewish writers and thinkers and so on and so forth, found themselves homeless and found themselves living in Nazi Germany, Nazi Austria, and in the nazified world. And so they were longing for that old world of the Austro Hungarian empire, where many peoples were allowed, but no nations existed. And they started reinventing it. Some of them, like Stefan Zweig, wrote actual kind of memoirs that mythologized it. Others, like my beloved Joseph Roth, reinvented it entirely in a fantastic book, for example, like the Radetke March, but also in other books, like the Emperor's Tomb or Job and many others. Their nostalgia didn't want to "make the Empire great again". Didn't want to recreate it. Wanted to salvage what had been and also improve it. Wanted to gift a better past to their descendants. Now this idea of gifting a better past is important, I think, especially for us today, our generation of my generation, I'm 41 years old, I don't feel like I can give my son a better future as a as a legacy, unfortunately, not. Also the generation of my parents did not give us a better future, but we can give them a better past. This is still in our power, reinventing it, reinventing what had been, and making it into a blueprint for something that could be again. This is what Joseph Roth, for example, did in the Radetke March, and not just him, of course, many, many others. That's the kind of nostalgia that I was championing in the book.

Wow. Thank you so much for just unpacking that and sharing the history and gifting a better pass is a beautiful idea. I definitely come from. I like to identify as a punk, punk mystic. And, you know, I always talk about No Future. A lot of people don't understand that. They think I'm I'm being a doomsday person, but I no, no, no, like, no future for this reality, this empire. And I hadn't really thought about the gifting a better past, although I'm very much into the notion of time binding of like bringing artifacts from the past and weaving it into our stories. But yeah, that's that's incredible. This is kind of connected. And I hope it's not a jump too far. I'm noticing the time I don't want to take up all your day. I think what I've really appreciated about you, you've mentioned the anarchism a little bit and just researching your work t hat goes back to when you were in Italy, is that in your writing and storytelling, it doesn't feel ideological at all. It just feels sort of embedded, or, I don't know, maybe it's because we share some predilections along there. So I just, I just feel it effectually, but I think there's something more there. And I'm wondering if you could speak to what you know, being an anarchist, and how it informs your work and how it plays out in because it is through. I do see it. I see it. I feel it when I read your work, but I don't, I don't feel like it's preachy or ideological.

Well, I'm happy you say this, because I try not to be

success!

well. I try to be a philosopher. So I think the main difference between the philosopher and a propagandist is that a philosopher doesn't necessarily hide the weak points of their thinking, but presents them the idea in philosophy is we don't reach the truth. Okay? We are philo -phers so we go towards wisdom, but nobody gets there. So we if we pretend we got there, then we just look really stupid. So presenting the weakness of our thinking is also part of what we do. But more specifically, the particular tone that you generously recognized to my writing is inspired by something I learned from one of my teachers. Well, not teacher at school, but teacher in intellectually. And not only who is Franco Berardi, Bifo, for whom you mentioned earlier, Bifo is, is famous for many things, for his thinking, for his thinking, for his political activism and so on and so forth. I had the good fortune of knowing him personally for many years, and the thing that impresses me the most about Franco is his courtesy. He's a gentleman. This is something that maybe doesn't come across very much in some parts of his more doomful writing, but he's a real gentleman. And he wrote in the 1980s actually, about courtesy. And he has this idea that you present ideas like you are making things available to somebody else, you know, like it is as if we were living together. And I don't know, I see that you need a new hammer to do something, and I'll I'll try to build one, and I offer it to you, and I'll see how it works, and so I see if maybe I did a good job or not. This is fundamentally courtesy, respecting the other to the extent that you make your things available to somebody else. So I learned this from from Franco and from his way of thinking and writing and in general, being one of the most humble people I've met, definitely at that level of intellectual production. Anarchism is is a political movement that contains many strengths, including the mystics and the punks, which, as you were saying, are very close, are very close to one another in many ways actually, and also different kinds of anarchism's. There are the anarcho communists. There are also, unfortunately, the anarcho libertarians, or anarcho capitalists that are prevalent in the United States, I feel very far from them. They are the anarcho primitivists and so on and so forth. My kind of anarchism is a combination of different things. In economic politics, I'm more of a communist in terms of the of the direction. I am more of an individualist in terms of the social attitude, and in other aspects, I'm more of the mystic. I combine all these different things. The thing that I have in common, that I think all these aspects have in common, is the idea that it is possible to create networks of solidarity without having to swear allegiance to any flag. This is something I'd. Went from Max Sterner, who used to say, I will always find comrades to join my same battle without having to swear on my same flag. And this also is something that you find in families, in groups of friends, you are a group, so to say, without any specific boundary, not necessarily, at least without any specific flag or set of laws, you operate together like a union of egoists, and you stay together as long as it is your pleasure to be together. Fundamental this, I think, is a good direction, also for politics. Why do we have to live together as a community? Because we belong, because God decided it. God definitely has better things to do than decide the size and the boundaries of communities, because we must this. None of this, to my mind, is a reasonable motive to create a political group. It is because we want to, because it's in our interest and we are together to the extent to which it is in our interest to be together. So on the one hand, I have a higher opinion of the Divinity than many kind of groups that see the divinity as deciding social conglomerations. And on the other, I have a lower opinion of human institutions than most other people.

Thank you so much. That was beautiful. I agree on a lot of what you said. I've never there's a way that North America, particularly the US, really likes to label anarchism in their different camps and sectarianism. And I was in a collective once, and I they asked me what kind of anarchist I was, and I was like, I don't even understand this question. I think I can really, it really resonates how you articulated that. So I appreciate that I have just a couple more questions. What's what's the difference between, in your opinion, and your and your professional philosophical opinion? What's the difference between mysticism and spirituality? And like, where do they connect?

Well, it depends. Spirituality is a term that has many every word has many meanings and comes to mean different things in different moments in time. I think today, spirituality has a meaning that probably the sense more from the Western esoteric tradition of the 19th century. I would say forms of kind of mesmerism, spiritualism of the of the of the 19th century. I think spirituality, as I understand it today, means that you believe in the existence of immaterial things, spirits, so to say. But these things are things, okay? So they are immaterial, but they are fundamentally individual beings with a small b, some of these beings are very big, like gods, for example, or universal forces, but nonetheless, they are individual beings. Mysticism, as I understand it, once again, means that you acknowledge more than believe, I have to say, acknowledge the fact of existence itself Being with a capital B, which is not specific, being small, but is the very fact that things are, that there is something rather than nothing. And you take this to be not only a fact and but an event and and the very ground of everything so, and you acknowledge this as the fundamental reality of things, of all things. So you relativize beings with a small b, the individual existence. And you absolutely, you make absolute existence Being with a capital B. This, I think, is my understanding of what is mysticism. That's why, often, when you look at mystical literature, which is always extremely obscure, of course, because you cannot speak directly of Being with a big B, you find mystical literature in East Asia, Central Asia, Middle East, Europe, and so on and so forth to say very similar things. Okay, so you have Christian mystics, Sufi mystics, Neoplatonic mystics, and so on and so forth. Taoists, fundamentally acknowledging the same Being with a capital B. You can call it Atman or Brahman or God or the one, or Al Hack and so on and so forth. But it's the same thing. This, by the way, talking of contempt traditions is the most interesting aspect of any very interesting tradition of the 20th century called perennialism, which talks about the transcendent unity of religions. This is also, say, the the beautiful kernel of a tradition with a very kind of like dubious crust all around it. Perennialism is often, I don't know. I really struggle to understand why. I struggle to understand why, understanding the authors themselves is often connected with reactionary politics, and this is a big point of contention that I have with perennialist thinkers, but the but the acknowledgement of this common root to all mystical traditions that is like the hub of a wheel, where all these different spikes of the wheel kind of diverge as they become more esoteric, but converge in the more esoteric essence, I think, is very valuable.

Thank you, that that really resonated too and, and I'm also very interested in the way that I'm noticing a form of mysticism being captured and seized across, like ideology, like, it's not just a, you know, I'm seeing this just seeing a trend of, like, people either going really, like the punk mystic going underground, and maybe that's where mysticism needs to be as like, not part of, yeah, not part of the capitalist machine is, that's what, you know, I'm seeing over I'm seeing a lot of, I don't know if you witnessed that, but...

but yeah, well, I think, I think mysticism definitely is not part of the capitalist machine, even if it tries to. But on the other hand, the individual person, the individual mystic, maybe the individual mystic has children, or a mother that is unwell, or many other reasons. So maybe that individual person is not available to suffer hunger and thirst on a daily basis and wants to live in a more or less so called normal life that is still possible to remain a mystic, even if you have to work a nine to five job, it is possible, of course, in the Zen tradition, is part of the discipline. But I think I look more into the Islamic tradition, and there this idea of disjointing your apparent esoteric, so public persona from your internal esoteric, private mind is a technique. It's called Tah ki ya, and it's an important technique. Is a very important metaphysical insight, and also an important insight in the way people and into psychology and how people operate. On the one hand, you can perform publicly as a part, you can pass as an apparently normal, functioning member of society to the necessary extent, and then you can reclaim for yourself an absolute freedom within -- this is an internal and inner emigration. This inner migration is also important, I think, as a possibility, as a technique, it shouldn't be discarded. Interestingly, it's exactly the kind of thing that reactionaries hate always, and "the enemy within the deserter or that doesn't declare it. So if you really want to drop out, why don't you just truly drop out into the woods, because you're poisoning and polluting our society from the inside." Yes, okay, this idea of being a deserter from within, of not taking on the imperative of being honest, absolutely in front of the big eye of of the big other, this is also part of anarchism.

It's like you always like, put words to feelings I have. I'm so grateful for you. Thank you so much. Yeah, I think especially with social media, right where we're encouraged to share every moment of our life, this gets a little bit more intense. Okay, I have a question that I ask everybody, because this shows about walking with change. So like, what you're what you're doing, like, right now, I invite my guest to share a little bit about what they're working on at this moment. Like, might not come out to light for years or and you can share as little or as much as you want about this, because I think it's, I think it's really important for for folks to hear some of the earlier processes of our creative work, instead of always the final, beautiful, well thought out. And with that, if you want to share some of your things you're working on too,

you can sure, well, I'm i. I guess you are asking about books, so

books or any, any art, poetry, anything you're doing, anything you're thinking about new questions that are bubbling up, that you are struggling with, grappling with.

Well, I'm doing two things while I'm actively pursuing as a project, and the other probably will take me a much longer time to finish. The one that I'm pursuing as a project is a short book on world building, written in the form of a of an architectural guide. I often work with architects. My wife is an architect also, and so I've been influenced by their way of thinking, and I'm trying to write a guide to how to create worlds fundamentally structured, like a guide to build a house. So that's one thing that should come out fairly soon, I think, if I have the energy to finish it. The other one is a project that I wanted to pursue immediately, but then I realized it would take me a much longer time. And the idea was to write a series of letters, ideally addressed to my son for his birthdays in the future, well, one for his immediate birthday now, and one for birthdays in the future, including birthdays where I will no longer be present. And the idea is to try to offer some lessons, or some advice, fundamentally, some advice on some fundamental existential problems that I've also face. And so from early advice, when he's becoming a teenager, on the fact that the fact that certain things are invisible doesn't mean they don't exist. Typically, many teenagers are made to become ashamed of some childish fantasies and so on, reclaiming these childish fantasies, not fantasies, after all, if you look about what is the status of immaterial things. All the way to late advice, or yeah, advice about not becoming paralyzed by the fear of death. Because although grief is real, death, I'm not so sure -- death is something that the living decree and the living observe, it is not something that the dead report. So we cannot trust the existence of death on any account, but we can trust the existence of grief. Obviously, there is a completely different thing. And so, yeah, this idea is to write a series of letters about such topics.

That is beautiful. I can't wait to I mean that I can imagine that will take some time, but that's beautiful. And the other book seems really important at this moment. What's, what's the title of it?

I don't know yet

Yeah. We need to Yeah. World building, or making worlds, as Ursula K Le Guin would say, I think is, yeah, just urgent, urgent, urgent. So thank you for that.

It's okay. I know the title of the other one is going to be probably called Three birthdays or four birthdays, because that's three birthdays. number it is...

Well, I look forward to it. I imagine, I imagine the two of you will do some collaborations in the future too.

Hopefully.

Yeah, it's always, yeah, it's always wonderful. You really feel it. You know, when you see a family play music together and like a it's the same thing with writing, I think,

hopefully it is.

yeah, yeah. I had so much more I wanted to talk about, but it's winding up to an hour, and I don't want to take up much more your time. Yeah, is there anything else you would like to say about Otherworlds, or any other top things we talked about today, or?

About Otherworlds? Well, maybe just one thing, maybe for your listeners in the United States. I've noticed often that in that part of the world, there is a perception of distance that is maybe exaggerated, so things that are not in the immediate vicinities are considered as irrelevant because way too far. What does anything to do? What does anything that happen once upon a time in Syria has to do with us? One thing that I noticed, also researching and writing this book, which has to do with Mediterranean histories, is that, first of all, the Mediterranean is not necessarily a location, it is a method. And this method, there are infinite Mediterraneans. There is a Mediterranean of the coast of Taiwan, for example, there is a Mediterranean in Central America. There are many Mediterranean so don't keep that as something that will make you feel distant from something to with the Mediterranean. The other is that the distance in time is also something that we should not take too seriously. Human beings have remained fundamentally the same, at least since the Paleolithic, probably even before. We have the same fundamental challenges. We are born without knowing why, we suffer, and we don't quite understand why. And also we die, and we don't quite know why, and we don't know anything beyond and before and after our life. The fundamental experience of life are always the same, and people in the past were people exactly like us. The context accounts for very little. Fundamentally, though, the advice that you receive from somebody living in 3000 BC is as relevant as the advice you find you receive from somebody living next door to you today, or from an expert to today. So developing a familiarity with the past truly enriches our experience of living and can really give us some incredible tools for facing these impossible challenges that we have to face. So that's a big recommendation that I have for you listeners.

Thank you. What a way to end the show. Thank you so much Federico! and I look forward to your future work.

Song, Braiding The Timelines