Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality

ISBN-13: 9781350044012 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 256 str.

Federico Campagna; Timothy Morton

Opis

We know that certain values or beliefs can undergo crises, but what if reality itself started to disintegrate? Yet if we wish to change our world, first we have to change our understanding of reality. Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality examines why and how we have reached the current condition of a seeming paralysis of action and imagination. Contemporary reality is structured around the morphological principle of technology, which informs every aspect of our way of understanding, imagining, and operating in the world. The first part of this book engages with the notion of what reality is, from Heidegger through to Max Stirner, and develops a detailed analysis of how it is actually structured. The second half runs contrary to the Western notion of technology as the model for making sense of our reality-system; it acts as a philosophical mirror that proposes Magic as an experimental, oppositional alternative, drawing inspiration from a range of ancient and modern sources from pagan Neoplatonism to Italian Autonomia, to Persian philosophers Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra, and the Vedata philosophy of language developed by Bhartrhari. While the book's main topic is reality-engineering in its technical aspects, the overall aim of the book is deeply political, demonstrating the necessity to unblock the process of social, political and cultural imagination and activity.Technic and Magic is both an original philosophical work, and a timely cultural intervention. Campagna both disturbs our understanding of reality and its structure, and restores it in a new form; this is a radical political act, as it is by understanding the basis of reality that we can decide what we can do within it.