Lines of flight: Mediterranean’s case

Book review: Campagna, F. Inye miry. Sredizemnomorskie uroki begstva ot istorii [Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History], transl. by N. Procenko. Moscow: Ad Marginem Press, 2026. (In Russian)

Abstract

This review is dedicated to the book Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History by the Italian-British philosopher F. Campagna, published in Russian in February 2026. Defined by the author himself as a practical guide to human survival under the pressure of historical forces, this work presents a chronologically consistent, albeit rhizomatic narrative about turning points in the history of various locations in the Mediterranean: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Turkey, etc. The author focuses on the phenomenon of imagination, which, during traumatic historical periods, becomes an important resource for self-preservation for individuals and communities caught in a liminal state between dying and emerging eras. Understood in this way, the effects of imagination include mythmaking, the creation of religious or philosophical schools, translation and literary activity, exile, adventurism, and so on. Each of these effects, according to Campagna, is dictated by a rejection of the dominant objective reality of History, impulses to flee from which, in the reviewer’s view, correlate with the metaphor of lines of flight taken from the works of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari. The review also notes that the author’s text seeks not only to talk about imagination, but also to activate the reader’s imagination through the use of literary language, thereby activating imagination on three fronts: the author’s, the reader’s, and the book’s characters’. Furthermore, the reviewer discerns and briefly substantiates the consonance of the key intentions of Otherworlds with at least two philosophical traditions – existentialism and anarchism. The final section presents some critical remarks related to the book’s insufficient research potential and unclear aims.