through europe - campagna-eng

Ernst Jünger, the forest anarch

Federico Campagna — Fri, 22 Aug 2014 10:10:28 +0000

“We were both Waldganger.
We preferred the forest to the city.”
Albert Hofmann on Ernst Jünger

103 Years

In 1895, the year Ernst Jünger was born, Wilhelm II was holding the reins of the German Empire, while Wilhelm Rontgen experimented with the first X-rays machine. In 1998, when Jünger died at the age of 103, Pathfinder had already landed on Mars and Google was about to launch its campaign to conquer the digital world. In the course of his life, fit for a Biblical patriarch, Jünger survived two world wars, twice witnessed the passage of the Halley comet, and took part to the full unfolding of modernity. Yet, it would be fair to say that he was scarcely ever there. Whether fleeing to the Algerian desert, fighting in the mud in La Somme, or secluded in his hermitage in High Swabia, Jünger shared with monks and dandies the ability to be in the world, while remaining at an observant distance from it. He was a theoretician in the original meaning of the word: in a contemplative position even in the heat of battle.

It was as if sliding along an orbit around the present that Jünger managed to turn his perspective almost at 360 degrees, moving from the revolutionary conservatism of his youth, to the extreme existential anarchism of his old age. It was also for this reason that my first encounter with his work left me at once fascinated and skeptical. Jünger, the anarcho-nazi? How could anyone take this man seriously?
Yet, how could I remain indifferent to the flying architecture of his prose, the blade of his thinking, and the charm of his life? I learned to love Jünger against my ingrained ideological judgement, like a slowly acquired taste. Over the years I’ve kept returning to Jünger’s toolbox, and every time, without fail, I’ve found in it new weapons and methods to apply to my own existence.

The Discovery Of A Malign Host: Anxiety and Work

Federico Campagna — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 11:48:41 +0000

Apollonio di Giovanni, Ulysses and Nausicaa, 1435

Notes for a talk at South London Gallery, 20th June 2014, as part of Anxiety Festival

I would like to discuss anxiety and its relationship with work today, from a philosophical perspective. I will examine anxiety as connected to the problem of hospitality, and particularly to broken hospitality, then I will explore the changes that the traditional concept of hospitality has undergone under the current condition of Nihilism. It will be in the field of Nihilism that I will explore the connections between anxiety and contemporary work. Finally, I will try to look for a philosophical alternative.

Before starting, I must acknowledge two debts. Most of the first part of this talk derives from a conversation I had with my friend and fellow writer Robert Prouse, whom I would like to thank. The final part of this talk, on the other hand, has been very influenced by the poet Lucy Mercer, and I would like to thank her for that.

TEXT 'FEED' NOW! The gamification of charity

Federico Campagna — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 09:49:55 +0000

On trains travelling in and out of British cities, it’s common to be confronted by a gallery of sorrowful portraits, peeping through the surface of ad posters. Kelly is distressed, John is abused, Samira is desperate. They need your help. But they don’t live in the same universe as you. Differently from the homeless person outside the station, or from the exploited migrant worker travelling next to you, their bodies live off the flow of digital data that springs from mobile phones worldwide. So grab yours NOW! By simply texting ‘life’, ‘feed’, ‘save’ to a phone number, you can restore their life-bars and improve the living conditions of these human tamagotchis. On the same phone on which you are playing Hay Day and Farmville, and by using very similar commands, you will be able to magically feed or shelter the virtual avatars Kelly, John, Samira, etc.

If this sounds like the description of a mediocre video game, it’s because it is. Gamification has been all the rage for years, and now it has reached the shores of charity campaigns. It goes without saying that a great number of charities provide very useful help to people in need, and it would be unfair to deride their efforts. Yet, their recent communication campaigns reveal something rotten at the heart both of the charity system, and of our own, contemporary reality-system.

Catholicism As Radical Atheism

Federico Campagna — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:32:12 +0000

Steering clear of absolutist atheism

Both in my latest book and in my recent writing, I have been working around the possibility of a strategy of radical atheism. Developing the seminal work of the German philosopher Max Stirner^{^[1]}, I defined radical atheism as a process of individual disentanglement from the web of injunctions and demands laid all around us by normative abstractions. I defined as ‘normative abstraction’ that particular position which abstract constructs typically occupy as soon as they cease to be docile tools in our hands and rear their head to the point of shaping, defining, and ultimately controlling our lives. Particularly, I focused on the most recent occupiers of this position, such as the burgeoning religions of work, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so on.

My radically atheist attack against normative abstractions, however, was for the great part dissimilar from traditional atheism. While traditional atheism locates its critique on an ontological or epistemological level, deriding the belief in God on the grounds of its ‘falseness’ or non-demonstrability, my proposal for radical atheism disregarded such issues entirely. My project was – and it still is – concerned exclusively with ethics, that is, with the individual’s quest for the ‘good life’.

Total Working Soldiers

Federico Campagna — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 17:25:51 +0000

Der Arbeiter

In 1932, Ernst Junger published the first edition of Der Arbeiter (The Worker), one of the most penetrating and controversial investigations of modernity to have appeared during the 20th century. At that time, Junger – later to become an anarchist – was one of the most prominent voices of the young German national-bolshevik movement, and one of the sources of inspiration for Adolf Hitler’s party. Decorated as a hero after WWI, Junger wrote Der Arbeiter both as a description of a future world in which the ‘form’ of the Worker (a new human ‘type’ which expresses itself through ‘technic’) would take dominion over the world, and as an invitation to take part to the ‘total mobilization’ operated by the new regime of ‘total work’.

Mixing a crystalline prose with ante litteram cyberpunk visions, Der Arbeiter reads today as a bleak premonition of the world that is unfolding in front of our eyes. Its prediction of the rise of a ‘new race of the Worker’, transcending nationality and ethnicity, finds its realisation in the human landscape of today’s metropolises. Its description of a future ‘cult’ of work - so deep as to invade every aspect of the daily, social or personal, rational or emotional life – loses its sci-fi tone if applied to the world we live in. Junger’s vision of a world ‘totally mobilised’ by work appears to have found a much greater application within contemporary capitalism, than it ever did during the brief experience of national-socialist Germany. It might not be a coincidence that Heidegger’s text The Question Concerning Technology – deeply inspired by the book of his friend Junger – only appeared in 1949, under the dawning light of the new world order.

The Cyrenaics: the ultra-hedonists of ancient anarchism

Federico Campagna — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 10:44:03 +0000

Featuring thinkers such as Theodoros ‘the Godless’, Hegesias ‘the Death-Persuader’ and Aristippos the Elder a.k.a. ‘the Royal Dog’, the Cyrenaics have always been the most vilified and neglected among the many philosophical schools of the Hellenistic age. Initiated almost informally by Aristippos the Elder, one of the companions of Socrates, the Cyrenaic school found its structure only two generations later at the hands of Aristippos’ grandchild, Aristippos the Younger. Unlike the majority of philosophical movements of the time, which sprung mostly in Athens or in the coastal part of modern Turkey, the Cyrenaics take their name from the North-Eastern area of today’s Libya. Perhaps because of their distance from the increasing dogmatism of Platonic/Aristotelian Greece, the Cyrenaics promoted a sophisticated form of ultra-hedonism which sounds remarkably free and audacious even to our postmodern ears.

Cynics: the radical atheism of the heavenly dogs

Federico Campagna — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 13:47:35 +0000

Dressed in rags, if dressed at all, their heads half-shaved, eating, defecating and masturbating in public, ranting in the middle of the marketplace, the Cynics are among the most controversial figures of ancient Western philosophy. With a move that long predated the witty self-deprecation of groups like the Cubists or Afroamerican ‘nigga’ rappers, Cynic philosophers presented themselves as ‘dogs’ (kynoi) – and as such they behaved in public. By taking their place just under the bottom of the social order, the dog-philosophers simultaneously declared themselves to be above it: such was the most famous thinker of the early Cynic school, Diogenes the ‘son of Zeus’, the ‘heavenly dog’, the ‘king’. According to a famous anecdote, when Diogenes – who at some point was captured and sold as a slave – was asked by the trader in what he was proficient, he replied: ‘In ruling men’. Then he pointed to a rich man in the crowed and said. ‘Sell me to this man; he needs a master.’[1]

From Resistance to Victory: on the logic of emancipatory warfare

Federico Campagna — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 10:11:25 +0000

Resistance

Humans seem to be inescapably bound to a position of double pressure. On the one hand, they are constricted by the limits of the mortality of their flesh, and by the finitude of the resources which surround them. On the other, they endure the weight of a system of abstract thoughts which, as well as ‘lifting’ them above the mortal world, also threatens them with sets of impossible demands. It is within this structure, I believe, that we should understand the meaning and practice of resistance.

At the same time stuck and enhanced by these two invisible neighbors, human life unfolds as constant negotiation between them. In its struggle to resist the pressure of mortality, and in their quest for what we could define synthetically as ‘health’, humans employ their ability for abstract thought. This is what is at heart, for example, of the development of science, technology, art and philosophy, but also, and most importantly, of politics. Perhaps it is politics, understood as the management of all available resources with the aim of enabling the enjoyment of life, above any other human practice, that constitutes our way of resisting the uncanny proximity of death.

The Holy Southern Empire: a proposal for Southern European anarcho-papism

Federico Campagna — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 09:20:05 +0000

Cura hominum potuit tantam componere Romam,

quantam non potuit solvere cura deum.

Hildebertus, Carmina Minora, no.36

Beyond the Latin Empire

A few months ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben published a short article on the opportunity to rethink the EU along its cultural traditions, rather than its economic dogmas. Agamben based his article on the work of the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojeve, who presented the case for the political union of France, Italy and Spain in a culturally homogeneous Latin Empire which was to be politically and economically lead by France, and opposed to the Anglo-German block.

Despite the violent public reaction that followed Agamben’s piece, I would claim that, if Agamben is to be judge guilty of something, it is not of having been too provocative, but not enough.

The Garden of Egoists: a short introduction to Epicurus and Stirner

Federico Campagna — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 11:34:13 +0000

Historical conditions

Although Epicurus founded his famous school, ‘The Garden’, at the end of the 3rd century BC, it was only centuries later, at the apogee of the Roman Empire, that his message reached its maximum level of diffusion.

By the time Classical Antiquity started fading into Late Antiquity, the Epicurean school challenged the Stoics and few other philosophical and religious schools – among which the obscure middle-eastern cult of Christianity – for hegemony over mainstream philosophy throughout the Empire.

This might sound surprising, if we think that one of the main principles of Epicureanism was lathe biose (live in hiding). Yet, Epicureanism owed its success to the perfect timeliness of its message.