Federico Campagna /// Prophetic Culture

This time around we ended up speaking about s some slightly different things, although there is some overlap We talked about the end of the world, narrative, time, metaphysics, death and what it means to die well. Uh it sounds far more depressing than it actually is. You'll hear Petra got hung up and wasn't able to join right away, uh but jumps in on the second part of the conversation.

It the the volcano erupts every day, so it's a constant eruption, but only on one side, so the house are on the other side. Just that the the earth rumbles constantly. Well during the day is fine, but then at night the the the bed kind of like conveys the the vibration.

fatalism perhaps about the end of the world here, even an acceptance of it, as though this is just kind of something that happens from time to time. Right. And a big part of this book, as I understand, wants to consider like the intellectual or spiritual work perhaps that is necessary in a post-future scenario. So anyway, if there's something in there you want to respond to, but um one of the things I'm really curious about is Who are you writing this book for?

So there is a moral implication about an apocalypse, so to say, at least in the way we understand it. Also, when we talk about a climate apocalypse, Often we have we subtend the moral implication about it, that for example, it is our our fault that this apocalypse is coming to be. When we talk about the end of uh great civilizations, the apocalypse of the Roman Empire, for example.

together with for example gibbons you might think that fundamentally it happened because they deserved Now in the way in which I see the the end of the world in in this book. I I leave aside any moral consideration about the fact of whether we deserve as a as a world and I would specify what I mean as a society to come to an end. I just observe that in history societies, civilizations, ideas about reality, what I call a world, come and go.

It is normal for a civilization, which is not just a series of economic and social structures, but it is a particular hypothesis, a particular idea about what the world fundamentally is. What kind of stuff makes up the world, whether materials, immaterials, were kind of populations populated, whether angels or molecules or passports. So this general hypothesis is what is fundamentally a world and a civilization.

I just consider um neutrally, so to say, that in history these hypotheses have come and they have gone. My own personal background coming from the south of Italy kind of gave me uh ample demonstration that that is the case. In Sicily, for example, we we have been conquered by almost everyone. I don't think there's have been there's been a moment in which Sicily was Sicily, probably ever since the Bronze Age.

But we have also seen because of that that with the passing of different dominations, often also different worlds were passing through the island, different ideas about what it means to be alive, what the world fundamentally is, and so on and so forth.

And they have remained also in the very fabric of our cities. So you can walk down the street and see in the ruins the strata, not just of different architectures, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Byzantine, the Spanish, the French, the Germans, so on and so forth. Italians at the end, but also different ideas and different ways of being in the world. The passage from one stratum to the next.

often, not always, coincided with an apocalypse, so to say, so with the the end of the previous world. But it didn't have a moral consideration about it. It just simply is a fact of history. That's why I talk more about apocatastasis, which is another idea. Apocatastasis is a way of looking at the end of things.

That doesn't stress the moral implication of it, but stresses the fact that whenever things come to an end, they don't fall into nothingness and disappear, but they are all reunited into one. So for something to die is to fall back. Into the great storehouse of infinite possibilities from which people with their imagination take out individual possibilities of life and then.

So it is apocalyptic in the on the one hand, but it is not doom and gloom, so to say. But more specifically, the the way in which I look at this apocalypse.

puts its accent on two aspects. The first has to do with apocatastasis. So the fact that worlds, civilizations fundamentally are hypotheses about reality, each of which gives us a particular world in which we live and we do certain things. And they all come out from the great storehouse of infinite imagination, what used to be called back in the days, God's mind. Or we can call today the infinite imagination of the human or of awareness or consciousness, whatever you like.

On the other hand, I go specifically to see how the current society in which we live, and I say we in the sense that you are in the United States and I am in the United Kingdom, and so both our uh the places where we live. exist within a certain world, which means we usually the people around us share a certain idea about reality. This particular idea seems to be coming to an end.

Once again, not because of any particular moral consideration, but simply because it is normal that these kinds of things come to pass. There are indications that point to this. In reference to this aspect of this idea coming to pass,

What I what I want to emphasize by looking at the so-called apocalyptic aspect of it is the fact that when things come to pass and come to an end, you have to start thinking about what you're leaving behind. When a world comes to an end, you have to start thinking about what you leave behind. This is very obvious when we think about ecological concerns.

For example, our particular way of understanding the environment today, thankfully, is that we have to leave it to the people that will come after us in a way that is not just the devastation of a desert. We need to leave them something that somehow is able to to be alive and to give the the rise to new environments, to new forms of life. Yeah.

The particular tinge that the sky had in the 90s in the early 90s when I was a child or in the late 80s. I remember the particular feeling of the air. I remember how that particular time being my past had a certain atmosphere, simply for the fact that it was my past. And I realized that my present, which to me seems to be so neat and clear, in fact, at the same time, simultaneously, as well as being my present, is also my son's past.

And it's very different that very same day in my son's past is different from how it is in my in my my own present. Living as somebody else's path. is already I think a good kind of like beginning to start thinking about what it means to die well. It means first of all to delink oneself from one's own present, not absolutely. But at least partially, let's say doubling your own presence into the world. You are present in the present.

But you're also present in the past. You are your own present, you are somebody else's past. So to a certain extent, you are alive and you are dead simultaneously. You're yourself and you're a goat. And so you act on these two different registers. As a writer, you have this experience sometimes, depending on what you write, of course. If you write journalism, maybe not so much. If you write literature, probably much more, or poetry.

That simultaneously you are intervening, so to say, in the literature of your own particular time, but at the same time, you're writing a book. that whether you like it or not, um, we'll have to speak to whoever picks it up, whenever, you know, in fifty years time, in two hundred years time. And you will have to withstand the judgment not only of your contemporaries, but also of the of the people that will come way after you. This is already, I think, the beginning of this idea of dying well.

unless they sing the world as a chorus, the same past, present, and future will take shape for them only as long as they shall be singing in metaphysical accord. Which there's a sense of performativity there and makes me think of the importance of repetition and ritual. And like I know you're using the singing thing as a metaphor, but it got me thinking about actual singing and where I've kind of encountered that thing before.

you know, where everyone or mostly everyone is singing, literally singing the same song, the same melody or like harmonizing if they're able to do that. Um and I can't help think of like, you know, growing up, going to church where several hundred people I've just become like more and more convinced that there is magic to be found in a group of people singing with one voice, moving together to the same rhythm, occupying the same uh time segment, maybe you would say.

For me, that's an act of world making. Um it just makes me think whatever comes next, however we want to think about recreating the world, uh song will be important to that.

Potentially you could sing anything. So whatever you are singing is conventional. There is no necessity to that particular singing. Then you and the group of people decide to sing that particular thing. And you are agents in that. It's your decision altogether to sing that. But After a little while.

Now I maybe I I would like to explain a little bit what I mean when I say when you make world, because it might not be um immediately clear. The fact is that when we understand, when we look around ourselves in any moment in our life, We create the environment that surrounds us. This is obvious if we think

Of course, the the the room that you see outside yourself, you're actually seeing inside your mind, so to say. Whether the mind isn't localized in your brain, that's discussable, but let's imagine the mind is a locus, is a place. Perception is then localized within. And then you project it outside as if it was outside of you. That's how you deal with

This is, of course, the indication that the world you inhabit has a artificial quality to it. It does it's not natural. The difference being that natural would entail that the world is always and already there outside of your mind. The world as you perceive it. Artificial means that if you are perceiving it within, then by the very fact that it is within your perceptive abilities, within your cognition, within your act of

ordering the world, or ordering your perceptions, then you are at least in part a co-creator of it. So it is at least in part, or possibly to a to a great extent or to a full extent, artificial. So in in that case, when we talk when we talk about making world, I mean it literally. Each of us provides themselves with the environment where they live by artificially creating it within their mind.

So each person has a different world because the mind, uh I mean, according to some philosophers, is collective to the extent that there is only one mind with many different instantiations. But in our experience, I can say for certain that my mind is mine. I cannot say for certain that your mind is equal, is the same, identical to my own. Then there might be different.

For that reason, since your way of ordering your own perceptions, endowing yourself with an environment with which has qualities like space, for example, like time, like names, identities, all things that are nowhere else to be fine found, certainly not in so called nature. Then it means that if if you and I we want to cooperate and collaborate in some way, then we need to find some common ground. So we need to find some ways of synchronizing our making world.

And that's when we start creating common shared worlds. We call them I usually in the book I define them in their biggest possible instantiation. when these worlds are very, very large and they are shared in common, not because necessarily every person believes in them, but because they are used as if they were common, then they become civilizations. General hypothesis about

How should we order time? How should we order space? What should we deem as existing or non existing? And so on and so forth. As part of this activity of making world, one aspect of it is the activity of making time. And that's where I talk about singing and rhythm a lot. Time itself, as metaphysicians and and scientists also know. It's not something that exists in the way that we imagine objects to exist by themselves.

Completely artificial. It doesn't have an existence of its own outside of the experience of somebody ordering it, perceiving it, counting it, said Aristotle. There is an element of that, observing it. It's entirely dependent on that. And I consider it in particular as entirely dependent on this general activity of making work. So I I get to the point of defining time itself as the rhythm of the activity of making world. Let's imagine that making world is a narrative, it's like singing a story.

reciting a story or as they did in antiquity, singing a story, the particular cadence, the particular rhythm, the particular intonation, but that is the time. The time for that world. And so yeah, we find already the notion of music and rhythm.

And that got me thinking, it just immediately brought to mind something that Mark C. Taylor writes. I mean, he's doing he's writing in a deconstructive mode, you know, he's a Deridian and such, but he says the task of the tailor is to cover rather than stitch. to veil rather than unveil. For Taylor, it's not this ex nielo situation, right? The text, or maybe in this case, what you know, a little closer to what we're talking about, the grammar of worlding.

is something that is stitched together from the from the tissues of previous worlds. So I'm just kind of really curious about this idea of creating a world out of nothing. What does that mean?

Unveiling has to do with taking away the veil, but revealing has to do with putting back the veil on Revellum. So to put back Revellare is to veil again. So in what way can we understand the fact that, for example, the book of Revelations has to do not with the taking away of the veil, but with the putting the veil on top? that's because to make sense of things In the way in which we understand sense.

So fundamentally in a narrative way, which could be conceptual or mathematical even, but that somehow is related to um a a linguistic quality, a literary quality, for example, creating characters and objects.

But but they can be discussed by revealing, so by veiling them within a narrative coating, which means sense, which means culture, which means language. But then we have to be careful. to veil them. A veil is thin, you know, it's by definition a thin veil, like a shroud, something thin, that re that reveals that and and in the sense also that you that lets you see through it a little bit, at least the shape.

The particular form of culture that is capable of doing that, coating without bearing its object, is what I define as prophetic culture. A lot of contemporary culture, on the other hand, has the pretense of substituting itself to the truth. The extent that we might mix what we say, our linguistic productions, whether scientific, political, like citizenship, financial, like the existence of money, we mistake them as facts of nature.

As things that really truly exist exactly as they are, I would say more like literature in the sense of um like a literal literal interpretation. When you understand something, the letter of it without going moving forward. This literal interpretation of the world in which we we think that things like citizenships, for example, money, these identities, genders, these things actually exist.

So they're not just a narrative veiling to try to have a relationship with something that is completely beyond them ultra-metaphysical. But no, we usually think, well, these are real things. You know, we have to deal with these things because you know the economy that's a real thing, the financial economy in particular. Now, this this is a mistake. This is the difference between revealing and bearing. Well, this is like bearing.

The ineffable heart of reality. So that thing which doesn't fall into language and concepts, bearing it so deeply that you completely forget about it.

I was really curious about this idea of the um, I mean you've already mentioned prophetic culture, but the sort of constitutive elements that uh that make that up. And you talk about this contradictory uh hybrid uh thing called the tetra pharmacon. Um, so can you talk a little bit about that configuration and why that's important for what you're up to?

And to create that legacy, I was trying to combine as a four-folded medicine elements coming from different experiences that we have developed over the past few thousand years in terms of making worlds. Now, we can put together things that come from very different eras in in history, even for us today, when we try when we start to understand ourselves as the past of somebody else.

If we understand our present time as the past of the people that will come after us, we will become the past together with any other past. The past is all simultaneous. Ten thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, fifty years ago, now. from the perspective of somebody coming into the uh after our own time we are all equally past in the same way that to the experience of many yilgamesh and nectanibo the faro they are more or less in the same fog of the past

And so we can deal with and take stuff from the ancient past and from the recent past with ease because they happen somehow simultaneously in the The figures that I suggested to take. The metaphysician, the shaman, the mystic, and the prophet, they come from different moments and different eras in time. The metaphysician, in particular, is best exemplified by modernity. The shaman is best exemplified by um

forms of worlding that historians for a long time described as archaic slash primitive. The mystic is defined by another form of worlding that is typical of other moments in time, the so-called late antique medieval, and so on and so forth. The prophet is is also like um is a figure that comes across different times and different eras, and that's the one that I am more interested in.

The metaphysician, the shaman and the mystic suggest three different ways in which we can make world. And I try to combine them. And to bind them together. into a message, into a legacy to leave to the people that come after us, I had to think not only of the content of this legacy, so the particular suggestions about how to make world.

in in the interest of people that come at the beginning of a new world or at the end of an of an old one, but also a particular coating, something that would allow these three things to stick, but also that would allow this message travel across the end of the world and the beginning of another one.

And to be absorbed, so to say, by the people that come. It's a bit like a medicine, uh, in a sense, literally. The the coating of the medicine and the elements that enhance absorption by the organism is the prophetic element, which is not so much to do which does not so much have to do with the content but with style the cultural style in which these contents can be conveyed.

But one of the things that you talk a little bit about with this prophetic element, it's not so much about a divinatory, although that's there, it's not primarily about a divinatory impulse or task, right? It's um in the first place an existential one. And then you do talk about heaven and hell, which is interesting because not many people do that do that anymore, at least not in the circles that I move in, but Yeah, what do you want to say about heaven and hell?

Let me explain. When I was saying earlier that a first step to learning to learn how to die well has to do with delinking oneself with one's own ab with one's own present. Kind of uh still identifying with oneself in your own present, but at the same time understanding that you live simultaneously in somebody else's past. The result is that you start being a bit detached from both. And then you find you are somehow at the cross points, at the crossroads between these two.

That's the kind of position that is typical of the prophet. Not in the sense of being only at the meeting point between different times. And that would, for example, allow you to see into the future or to see into the past or the present with the same E. But at being at the crossroads between different times, so delinking oneself from one's own world and understanding that there are other worlds and trying to speak also in a way that speaks to them.

but also keeping one foot, so to say, outside of all the world. trying to a certain extent to include within your own viewpoint. the awareness that worlds are artificial creations, that worlds are narrative creations, trying to embrace their narrative quality, their fictional artificial quality.

And trying to include within your viewpoint the fact that there is something outside of that narrative that you cannot include narratively, of course, but that you can you should also not completely forget. You should reveal once again rather than try to deny or to bury entirely.

are before they are in a particular way, before they are particular things. But the very fact that anything, material, immaterial, to a certain extent can be said to exist.

And then to the extent of what reality is a particular reality made of particular things and so on and so forth, is the world, is language, is creative and so on and so forth. Artificial, but to the extent to which things merely are, that's ineffable. Now, in the case of a video game, The ineffable is already there to the extent to which we realize that that world of the video game exists. somehow, but exist. It is enlivened, it is traversed, it is held up. It is grounded on existence.

In some form. And we understand, if we start thinking about it, that this existence, although it is blatant, it is the most Visible thing of all, is at the same time the most invisible thing of all. This is how, for example, Hermes Trismus Gistus was talking about his idea of the ineffable divinity. said saying that God equals God um is the most visible and the most invisible of all things.

So in a video game, there is no need to insert it. It's already there. What you can insert if you wish is reminders. Same as in the world. There is no need to insert the ineffable in the world. It's already there, whether we like it or not. Inserting reminders, that is a fact. For example, it could be done as forms as glitches, for example. So sabotaging to a certain extent the smooth operation of the video game.

or um to reveal that there is something beyond it. That's the old Heidegarian trick of the broken hammer, so to say. So sabotaging what today is understood as the glitch. sometimes it's understood in Heideggerian sense, sometimes it's not. Or it could be done also by the particular poetics of the video game, the way in which it could be interacting with things outside of the game itself, with real life, to a certain extent. There's another

Oh, good trick to explain mystery, think of stranger things and the interaction between dungeons and dragons and the reality of their life. So there's many ways of inserting creative. The necessity

And I I did not invent those needs on the basis of my own um imagination, but I tried to observe previous instances of worlds coming to an end and worlds restarting soon after, what we call usually the archaic age, like the archaic age of Greece, after the Atlantic Middle Age. and i noticed that in that particular subjectivity

of the archaic is we have something similar to the subjectivity of an adolescent. There's a word that I prefer to teenager. Teenager is connected to a particular age, adolescent to a particular um subject disposition of the subject.

But at the same time, the adolescents and the archaics tend to be wary of the consequences of restructuring the world. The example I gave in the book is Oedipus, old example, but not for the usual story of him and his mother and so on or the Sphinx, but for the experience that the moment he bridles chaos, he defeats the Sphinx, he creates order. The city flourishes again, he becomes king, and then immediately is destroyed, not by his not by destiny, not by his actions.

So, to cater for these two opposite requirements, I combined the metaphysician, the shaman, and the mystic, and then the prophet as a kind of general coating to bind them together. The metaphysician is the one that creates real order. is the one that is the cartographer, is the one that maps things fundamentally. The shaman has a

That's what the metaphysician does. It's a particular way of making the world. It's the way that is more prevalent in contemporary Western societies, for example, at the moment. Is a different way of making world. So here I'm using, of course, particular characters, particular figures as ways of making. It's not the shaman, it's the shamanistic approach.

And the shaman has to do more with regulating the flow. So not so much with cataloguing things, but regulating the flow of mutations across the world, within the world. but also regulating the flow that comes from between the world and what is outside of the world.

When the ineffable sometimes break through the but the the uh constructions of language, you might have this disquieting experience of chaos. And the shaman not only regulates the flow of mutations within, but also patrols the border, so to say, between uh ineffability and language, eternity and time.

It has to do with another form of worlding, which is the, let's say the pendant, the the goes together with and it's the opposite of the metaphysician. The metaphysician is inside the world and order. The shaman is a little bit in between, still of the world. The mystic is from outside of the world entirely. He is completely a foreigner in every land.

Like for example, when the in the cosp gospel according to John, uh Jesus Christ says himself that you're like I've taken you from the world, you're no longer of the world. This mystical element comes through in the sense of that the mystic does not belong, the world belongs to the eternity, doesn't belong to time, belongs to ineffability, doesn't belong to language, and so on and so forth. So in a way it is an agent of chaos, if you like, much more than the metaphysician.

but from a perspective where chaos and order are dissolved so you see our three influences there are complementary very much

Which defies literature or shamanism, which doesn't rely on literature at all, unless in the hands of an anthropologist. uh then it becomes impossible. So yes, there is an element of that, but and to a certain extent that so to say guarantees of the fact that it can be done. I I don't wish in any way to present myself as the the epitome of any of these things.

Um, let's say once again, I'm more like a theoretician of music rather than a musician or a composer. As I said, it's like a pair of glasses, more than like the eyes of a great artist.

Certainly in the way, uh let's say at least the authors of the Gospels have the ability to speak prophetically. But also Plotinus, the great philosopher Plutinus, of the the founding father, so to say, of Neoplatonism. certainly is a prophet i in that sense. One is one was uh a philosopher, one was a poet, one was, well, who knows how to describe exactly either Mohammed or Jesus as professionally. So to the extent to which people uh attune whatever production they do.

to a particular register with a particular viewpoint, with a certain um distance first of all between who they are and where they are and the voice with which they speak. I think that's the first immediate thing to delink to a certain extent Your supposed identity, localization in space-time, and the voice that you convey, then to that extent, it is possible to start moving towards a prophetic register of cultural production. You can find it in architecture.

Easily. There's certain types of architecture that have that have prophetic qualities in that particular way. Paul Valerie, when talking in the book Eupalinos or the architect, talks about buildings that sing. And it gives a particular notion of the way in which architectures can do. certain types of music have the same ability and so on and so forth. So I would say rather than it is a particular register than a particular form of creation.

But what I'm h hearing you saying now is that the prophet is also someone who's actually who's not kind of consciously creating worlds, but who's kind of making worlds happen. And and to that extent you can't be kind of an an author who's like c conscious of your own creativity, but you're actually you have to believe that you're a Jesus, so to say.

and so on and so forth. You know, this is the content of course of the book, but also of the previous one. To that extent you are a prophet, whether you like it or not. And you can be just, for example, a parrot. You can overwrite anything. You just uh you're a parent, you live in a certain way, you have an influence on your children in a particular way, and the influence that you have on them is just de facto prophetic. Um so you don't need to be a video game designer or anything else.

Or Jesus Christ, you could be anyone with a particular stance towards worlding. Because the metaphysical attitude that one has towards worlding already, always and already influences the way in which you do anything. The behaviors are based on the your notion of sense. You do things that have sense. That's why everybody does good. Nobody does evil willingly, obviously, no.

People make mistakes, but nobody's evil because everybody acts according to the senses they perceive. On the basis of their sense, the sense has to do with their metaphysical stance, first and foremost. Let's say is the basic foundation of the game. So by modifying that. Sense is modified. By modifying your idea of reality, sense is modified and behaviors are modified accordingly. And also aesthetics, artistic creations, and whatever else you do.

You don't have to be, as I was saying, Jesus. Also in the sense that, of course, being a prophet.

So it doesn't require any uh particular divinity or um moral standing or purity and so on and so forth. You don't have to be an exceptional person in that way. You have to have a particular way outlook towards metaphysics and the rest does follow.

with when you have certain dispositions towards, in that particular case, some emotional events. You are them to a certain extent, without any outer sign. So in that sense, yes, you become to read the Quran properly, you have to become Muhammad, but simply in the sense that you occupy his same position.

In the same way that sometimes you you read a certain novel and it really speaks to you because you occupy the position of the characters, or to a certain extent you find yourself in the same position as as the character. It's a cognitive shift. It doesn't require any particular uh visible outer transformation.

To clarify, this doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy. When I say this doesn't mean this doesn't mean that I don't mean to say in the way in which, for example, sometimes people say everybody is an artist.

Whatever you do, just do it with love and you're an artist. It's not it's not it's not that easy. This is not a self-help book. But um But I'm just saying that delinked with the particular requirements in terms of outer production, in terms of particular identities, in terms of particular uh professional legitimation.

And I was fascinated by the way in which you embraced the Islamic well that that trajectory within Muslim faith that uh has a way of handling and kind of postponing or and yet embracing death and the way in which you elevated the squire in the Bergman's Seventh seal rather than than the night. Can you say something about that?

And so that's how it first came. And then it m it changed with time because I started realizing that. It's not so much rebelling against death in the sense that we want to be alive forever in the way of Elon Musk or whatever other millionaire wants to do, I don't know, cryogenically flows their brain or something like that. But in the sense that we have the possibility of looking at the event of death in many different ways. One of these ways is to

take it literally. The letter of it is that you have a situation in which things are only what you can catalogue linguistically, for example, this. And event is that event, uh, and death is that event in which this linguistic layer shatters. And so we take it literally as the end of that thing. But this is only one way of looking at death. And we have taken it fanatically as the truth and superstition.

There are other ways of looking at death, depending once again on your particular metaphysics, according to which death itself is a known event. Yeah. Not simply because as Seneca used to put it to to to calm to calm people down, when when death comes you are gone and when when you are there, death is not there.

Not in that way, but in the sense that the event of the of the end of certain linguistic qualities, which we catalogue in the world, only affects those linguistic qualities. If we believe that that's all there is. But if we realise that of course what we can apprehend in catalogue and name Cannot coincide with the totality of existence. It would be an incredible coincidence if the entirety of the universe was created precisely to match in its foundational uh

basis exactly our cognitive abilities to the point that our language really captures it. That would be incre much more unlikely than the Pastaferians and the flying spaghetti monster. You know, that would that it's such an incredibly superstitious belief that belief. Of course, then we have to realise that beyond language there is something.

In reality, and of course, death being an event that befalls specifically language, death as we conceptualize it, is specifically a linguistic event, then it is not affecting non-linguistic. In that sense, as you find in the Corpus Hermeticum, for example, death itself does not exist.

You have it does not exist at all. And then John the Squire has that rebellion. Of course, in the film, he actually just doesn't want to die because he just loves uh women and food and alcohol, whatever. Like he's a particular character. Okay. But in the way in which I utilize it and then I invent a pseudobiography of John Descquire, who goes to Syria and so on and so forth.

The attempt, of course, is similar, Mutatis Mutandis, of course, on a different level, what Epicurus tries to do in the rerum natura. Because Epicurus utilizes his particular tetrapharmacon, which is a Epicurean borrowing, of course, mostly to calm people down, to tell them like the thunder that you hear is not the gods being angry at you.

There is a crazy superstitious belief, relax. Okay. And in a sense, also relaxing one's own attitude towards death is, I think, important. It does have value in the sense that. It modifies the way in which we are connected to the experience of living. The incredible feeling of frustration that you have from a staunch materialistic approach.

I think it goes quite together with certain hyper-violent behaviors that typically g come from frustration. You believe that your life, the material life and the linguistic life with all there is. It is a absurd cruelty to bring you into the world and to subject you to this shambolic charade and then whatever you have achieved to take it away. And then of course, as you approach the end.

Any person endowed with sense would just try to release their frustration by destroying as much as possible of the world around themselves. It is a good behavior in the sense that it makes sense. But it depends on one's idea of what death actually constitutes. If we have a modified different idea, things change. Of course, if you have an imagination that after death there is another life in which you are judged for your sins and all that kind of stuff, you modify your life in a certain way.

If you think that afterwards there is a cycle of reincarnations, then you modify it in a certain way. If you think of death as a non-event, then you modify it in another way.

He had this notion working most, he had a very interesting thing. He was basically a Parmenidean. So he believed that being is non being is not. Okay. And on the basis of this, He um basically goes against our understanding of things at the moment as things that can come out of non-existence. Exist and then fall into non existence. So being born, being alive, and dying. Okay. There's a movement in and out of existence. He says. If we use that.

that notion, then we are contradicting ourselves because then existence would be something that at some point isn't, at some point is, and at some point isn't again. So fundamentally, existence would be for the most part, for the almost totality, except the glimmer which is the present. would be non-existence. So what kind of existence is that, which isn't the vast majority of its of itself? And of course it comes to the idea that then everything is eternal.

Things existing can exist only to the extent to which are eternal. Anything that exists exists eternally. But not only, he says, in general terms, but also specifically. Because also this particular moment on this particular day in which we are meeting and this particular situation, being an existent is a turn. The same movement of this particular situation within the spotlight of the present, being an event which exists, is eternal. So there is an eternal return, yes.

but not an eternal return in the sense that it's cyclical one after the other but an eternal return in the sense that it is eternally omnipresent

But there was something that I read in your book that made me think about that, because I know that Thomas Altice is a radical theologian. He puts that Rilkian thought from that poem. Together with uh with the Nietzsche and eternal return, actually. And in order to kind of rethink the Jesus event.