Building worlds with the dead, traitors, and cosmonauts  

This brief essay begins with a hypothesis: Otherworld – Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History, by Federico Campagna (recently published by Bloomsbury), goes beyond being just a philosophy book. It is an act of authorship, a symbolic tool for shaping worlds during times of collapse. What follows is an expanded interpretation of the work, describing its speculative figures and landscapes related to the emerging field of publishing futures, where publishing functions as a cosmopolitical practice and a form of ontological inscription.

Writing about worlds when they falter requires more than just theory. It calls for a gesture—something akin to setting up a weather station or preparing a ritual: delicate, contextual, provisional. The aim is not to depict Campagna or to translate his ideas into design language but to accompany—carefully and with some divergence—the symbolic constellation that spans both the book and those editorial practices that aim to create conditions for livable futures.

Campagna takes a stance that actively opposes the technification of reality and its ontological limits. Instead of closed systems, he offers hesitant images, Orphic fragments, and micro-narratives that serve as outdated instructions. From the dead to the migrant, from the traitor to the archivist, the figures in Otherworlds redefine our understanding of the world, time, and meaning. They act as symbolic operators that challenge the current ontology, not through doctrine but through performative acts of speech.

In design, this gesture involves reopening the projected field, not only in material terms but also ontologically. It shows that the “world” is a symbolic construct that can be adjusted editorially. In this way, it aligns with what speculative design and light infrastructures, as proposed by Ezio Manzini, aim to make thinkable: transition.

However, it is essential to recognize that these figures hold a symbolic weight rooted in a Gnostic, Mediterranean, European tradition. Which worlds are missing from this collection? What epistemologies could evoke other dead, other traitors, with grammars that bypass this tradition? The power of the gesture lies in its suggestion, but its full impact requires a conscious effort to decenter.

This is where its connection to publishing futures becomes clear: not as a disciplinary field, but as an ontological approach. Publishing here is not intended to represent or predict, but to create — from signs, remnants, atmospheres — symbolic tools capable of supporting transitions.

Campagna’s philosophical originality arises from his rare poetic precision in blending metaphysical tradition with an ethics of symbolic attention. Instead of strict doctrines, he crafts ontological atmospheres. His writing belongs to a lineage that includes Simone Weil, Aby Warburg, Giorgio Agamben, medieval mystics, and ancient Gnostics. Each figure functions less as a concept and more as a gesture: a prompt to imagine, and through that, to reshape reality.

That is why Otherworlds gains a disturbing clarity in the present. In a time marked by climate collapse, infrastructural change, and deep cultural shifts, the book offers a symbolic map of a world in transition. It provides no final diagnoses or universal solutions; it sketches a fragile, sensitive web between worlds, practices, and desires.

Its strength lies in being essential to those who carefully cultivate worlds through ethics and technique—a poetic grammar that guides the act of publishing during a time when the future is already in motion. Otherworlds is not just an alternative: it is a partner—sensitive, rigorous, and unexpected—for those committed to re-enchanting publishing as a shared way of living.

In this text, I examine the symbolic constellation proposed by Campagna along with the modes of attention, hesitation, and composition that shape the emerging field of publishing futures. This is not about illustrating concepts but about inhabiting interstices: spaces where design becomes applied metaphysics, and publishing, quite literally, makes the world possible.

The goal is not to interpret the book through an academic lens but to use it as a speculative interface for thinking about publishing as an act of worlding — creating a world. Within this framework, publishing futures do not emerge as predictions but as symbolic technologies: conveying ways of living and imagining amid conditions of cosmological instability.

Reading is never a neutral act. As I go through this book, I realize it’s not just a sequence of chapters but a constellation of eleven archetypal situations—the dead, the traitor, the gnostic, the cosmonaut, the exile, the archivist, the translator, the myth, the revelation, the migrant, and finally, the image of ice cream in winter. Maybe this order is as much about fiction as fact, emerging from a reading that relies more on symbolic connections than strict structure. Each figure acts as a performative gesture of disbelief and world reinvention, emphasizing modes of survival or existential drift that follow the collapse of a dominant cosmology.

This essay doesn’t analyze them in a straight line, but instead weaves a web of closeness, tension, and shifts among them. It’s about writing with and through the book, not just summarizing it.

I therefore propose rephrasing the essay itself to clarify its performative ambiguity — not as a methodological confession, but as a critical tactic that engages with the very nature of reading. Accordingly, all quoted phrases attributed to figures such as the Exile, the Archivist, and others should not be understood as literal transcriptions from Otherworlds, but as speculative compositions that expand its conceptual universe — a form of performative writing that combines critical analysis and editorial fiction.

This procedure, although literary in nature, carries ethical implications: by straddling citation and invention, it requires active attention from the reader and a tacit responsibility from the writer — not to preserve factual truth, but to maintain conceptual integrity.

This positioning is crucial to how the book is read — and how this text responds to it. Instead of giving a summary of Otherworlds, it aims to dwell in its atmosphere, exploring speculative paths through its symbolic constellation. Otherworlds, by Federico Campagna, isn’t exactly a book about the future. Nor is it about the past. It exists in that space where neither makes sense anymore, and all that’s left is to imagine a way to stay or to move through. A collection of cosmopolitical survivals, perhaps. A treatise disguised as speculative archaeology. Or a useless manual for editors desperate for new grammar.

*

Let’s start with Toledo. A long table where multiple languages coexist without merging. Translation as both betrayal and hospitality. This image endures. It’s almost as if Campagna is telling us: it is fragments, not systems, that sustain the world. 

“Fragments are not interruptions of order. They are its language.” (The Translator)

There, as now, editing is not a task of neutral mediation but of dynamic tension between different realities. Anne-Marie Willis described design as applied ontology. The medieval translator, then, acts as a creator of transitions: they forge connections between worlds, not to merge them, but to make them accessible.

Editing, in this sense, appears infrastructural: more than just a technical system for creating objects, it becomes a subtle art of shifting between ontologies. Ezio Manzini discusses building “light infrastructures” for desirable futures; Campagna seems to echo that idea through figures like translators or migrants—his archetypal Mediterranean acts as a repository of evolving meaning systems, reinterpretated, recombined, and relocated. Instead of nostalgia, he advocates a cosmopolitical sensitivity.

The figure of the exile emphasizes the division between different cosmologies. By rejecting the illusion of an established world, they become a witness to a negative potential. They neither act nor resist — they withdraw. The exile teaches us to wait for another logic, even without guarantees.

“The exiled learns to stay silent until a new world begins to speak.” (The Exile)

This is suspension as editing. In this case, design does not project — it sustains the opening.

The cosmonauts can be seen as the speculative designers of ancient times: Hermeticists, Gnostics, Neoplatonists — figures who used thought as propulsion and writing as their vessel. When Arturo Escobar suggests ontological design, he is unknowingly referring to them. Each scroll offers a proposal to explore the unseen. Each figure serves as a protocol for symbolic exploration. 

“The cosmonaut knows that the unknown does not reveal itself through conquest, but through attunement.” (The Cosmonaut)

Here, editing starts to resemble astrobiology: trying to make understandable what is beyond us. Campagna expands editing into metaphysics.

The figure of the traitor directly challenges design. To betray is to change oneself. One alters worlds by changing names. One reconfigures the system of belonging. Transition design, as proposed by Irwin & Tonkinwise, does not depict ideal forms but supports movement between realities. The traitor becomes an ontological hacker: uninstalling themselves from one system and temporarily installing themselves in another. Editing, here, is betrayal — a promise made to a world that has not yet materialized. 

“A traitor does not abandon a world. They transform its grammar.” (The Traitor)

In the image of the archivist, we once again see the act of caring for ruins — not as relics, but as unrealized possibilities. Ruins become active records. Editorial work is not just transmission but also conjuration.

“An archive is not a tomb. It is a spell waiting to be read.” (The Archivist)

Publishing futures requires this rethinking: the editor as subtle sorcerer, able to hear the unfinished. At this point, Jorge Luis Borges’ reflections on infinite libraries become evocative — editing as a blind yet persistent act, as close to divination as to creation.

The myth here is not opposed to logos, nor does it retreat into the past. It functions as a narrative tool for reworking reality. Each ancient myth acts as a usable template, a symbolic interface.

“Myths are not stories from the past. They are blueprints of symbolic infrastructure.” (The Myth)

Campagna suggests viewing myths as transitional tools — not as digital constructs, but as rituals. They serve as fragile bridges between conflicting ontologies. This perspective aligns with Escobar’s concept of “transition languages”: myth as a lingua franca connecting incompatible worlds.

In Technic and Magic, Campagna already outlined the difference between a factual technical regime and a magical regime of possibility. In The Last Night, he introduced the ontological strike as a rejection of the imposed reality. Otherworlds does not choose between these gestures; it becomes their manifestation. A book that reveals worlds to come through writing that aims not to prove but to provoke.

It is at this point that publishing futures emerges as an ontological strategy. Each edition becomes an imagined fiction. Each editorial act, an act of temporal hospitality. When Campagna evokes the image of a child receiving a summer ice cream in the middle of winter, he is not appealing to nostalgia. He is invoking editing as a rupture in the climate of reality.

“Sudden as that day’s sunlight, an ice-cream cone appeared from my grandmother’s hands. I grabbed it, and all my speculations were swept away by the miracle of a summer day that had broken through the winter.” (The Ice Cream)

That image isn’t a metaphor — it’s an operative model. An ice cream cone can stand for a book, a publishing platform, or a light infrastructure. It’s a sensitive gesture that shifts the symbolic temperature of an era. To publish futures is to offer a taste of an unseasonable season. An edition, yes — but an atmospheric one.

“Publishing, like breathing, changes the pressure of the world.” (The Ice Cream)

And then? Perhaps the book does not end. Or perhaps the very act of ending must be rethought. Campagna does not conclude with an edict, but with a breath. Editing, in this horizon, is less a closure than an inhabited continuity. Each figure, each myth, each fragment he conjures remains as an invitation to re-edit, to unauthorized use, to apocryphal montage. Perhaps publishing is precisely that: reopening what seemed closed — not out of nostalgia, but through insistence.

Thus, among the dead, the traitors, the Gnostics, the migrants, the archivists, and the cosmonauts, it becomes clear that the future is not a straight path but a series of shortcuts. Some lead to the abyss. Others to laughter. And some bring us back—without knowing how—to the starting point, with eyes more worn and more attentive. As if the world, after all, could be re-edited.

“The world is not a single edition. It is an anthology of possible realities.” (The Revelation)

Finally, we must examine the performativity of the book itself: its fragmentary and atmospheric quality, which can sometimes border on mystical enchantment, hints at an underlying metaphysics that suggests — without explicitly stating — reading infrastructures. If publishing futures are to be considered a serious technical, ethical, and political practice, then we need to ask: how do these atmospheres form in concrete editorial formats? What roles do layout, typography, accessibility, and translation play in bringing these images to life? The danger here is an ontology without mediation — a gesture-based politics that overlooks the politics of means.

Some books end with a period. Others with a pause. Otherworlds perhaps conclude like an echo, because something begins to circulate — not a definitive end, but a vibratory field that spreads.

Throughout this act of reading, Otherworlds was crossed like one crosses a magnetic field.

“The cosmonaut does not aim to colonize the unknown. Instead, they drift in it, tuning their instruments to receive its signal.” (The Cosmonaut)

Campagna’s figures — the traitor, the exile, the myth, the archivist — have contaminated the lexicon and gestures of design. Not by analogy, but by osmosis. It was this hesitant, almost vibratory approximation that allowed for the discovery, within publishing futures, of a grammar of attention to the possible.

This book’s contribution is in how it broadens our view of publishing — not as just a reproduction method, but as an act of inscription within an ontological environment.

“A single moment, if true enough, can restore a season that seemed gone forever.” (The Ice Cream)

Editing, then, is more than just organizing content. It is an attentive act, capable of perceiving what is to come — even if it has not yet materialized. Campagna offers more than philosophy: he provides spiritual practice, editorial mapping, and metaphysical weather forecasting. Those who publish with the dead, the traitors, and the cosmonauts become more attuned to what resists — and more capable of caring for what endures. But what, after all, is that resistance?

Maybe it’s about protecting areas of language that haven’t yielded to technical efficiency. About maintaining editorial practices that value slowness, opacity, and error as rich possibilities. To resist here isn’t about confronting directly — it’s about creating conditions for the survival of the undisciplined: informal reading groups, light infrastructure, editions that reject closure in favor of openness.

A political gesture expressed both in content and form: through the choice of supports, rhythms, and circulation circuits.

To publish futures, in this sense, is also to care for the present as if it were already a remainder — and in that remainder, to plant possibilities, however fleeting they may be.

References

Campagna, F. (2013). The last night: Anti-work, atheism, adventure. Zero Books.

Campagna, F. (2018). Technic and magic: The reconstruction of reality. Bloomsbury Academic.

Campagna, F. (2025). Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History. Bloomsbury Academic.

Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.

Irwin, T., & Tonkinwise, C. (2015). Transition design overview. Carnegie Mellon University.

Manzini, E. (2015). Design, when everybody designs: An introduction to design for social innovation. MIT Press.

Willis, A.-M. (2006). Ontological designing. Design Philosophy Papers, 4(2), 69–92. https://doi.org/10.2752/144871306X13966268131514