This essay intends to explore the ontological consequences of Vilém Flusser’s philosophy of language that he introduced in his first works, written in Portuguese and published in Brazil. This paper will critically examine its main topics: his definition of speech as an act and language as an expanding human presence in the cosmos; linguistic performance as the most dignifying human characteristic and the identification of reality with language; and finally, the thesis that language creates, shapes and disseminates reality. Starting out (...) from an instrumental definition of language, Flusser is compelled to define the world as secondary in relation to language. This paper tries to examine the underlying tensions or paradoxes of such a position as part of Flusser’s dramatic rhetoric strategy, exploring the dangers of an extremely idealistic position sustaining the project of a linguistic ontology. (shrink)

This article seeks to disclose the strategies used by Vilém Flusser for writing his texts while living in Brazil. After presenting the basic elements of his Brazilian „performance“, we turn our attention to the controversies around him – why was he rejected by many contemporary scholars, why was he subjected to severely ironic criticism by professional critics and – at the same time – aroused great interest among a vast number of readers? Starting from the analysis of his book “Language (...) and reality“ and from three essays, we try to show that the philosopher developed the practice of playing a particular kind of game as a clear and sophisticated strategy to get across an emotional and eloquent meaning through his work. In the last pages of his book “Brazilian Phenomenology," written shortly after leaving Brazil for good, he introduces the behavioral characteristics of a new man, the “homo ludens" whose involvement with society displays structure of a game: neither to win, nor to avoid defeat, but to play with the purpose of changing the rules of the game. Studying the works of Vilém Flusser, we reach the conclusion that he himself used this third type of action, crossing through the traditional discourse of western science, causing the indignation of professors, irritating journalists and fascinating readers. (shrink)

Language and Reality , written 1963 in Portuguese, is Vilém Flusser’s first publication on the subject of language. Communication as inter-subjective conversation is regarded here as the very form in which language lives up to itself. Already in this early phase of his Brazilian work – which so far has not been given the attention it deserves – future themes are present in an embryonic way. His reflections on electronic brains participating in a communication network, for instance, can be found (...) again in the concept of a telematic information society. Flusser’s recourse to European language theories throws a rather unexpected light on his media and communication theory of the eighties and early nineties. (shrink)

This essay deals with the relationship of mathematics and music in Vilém Flusser’s work, an aspect that has not received the attention it deserves. Related issues are the complex dialectics of sound, number, image and word as well as the relationship of hearing and seeing. The essay focuses on two texts written 22 years apart but closely connected to each other: The History of the Devil and Into the Universe of Technical Images. This makes it possible to illustrate the inner (...) coherence of the whole oeuvre and the persistence with which Flusser kept returning to the same central issues of his thinking and writing. In the context of the issue discussed here, this leads to an all-encompassing synthesis of several diverging aspects. In the new computerized technical images mathematics and music, the West and the East, art and science merge, the senses and the codes come together, the eye, the ear and the fingertips, the visual, the acoustic and the tactile converge and fuse creating a new unheard of and unseen multilingual, multi-mediatic and multi-discursive unity. (shrink)

Vilém Flusser wrote about the Brazilian modernist author João Guimarães Rosa who he met personally. Although most of Guimarães Rosa’s work had been written before their meeting, Flusser’s thinking might have influenced his writing. In 1961, Guimarães Rosa published the short story Fita verde no cabelo and Flusser wrote an article about it. Both texts were published the same year in the Literary Supplement of O Estado de São Paulo. The essay focuses on questions of style as well as on (...) the cultural and etymological references of the two writers. (shrink)

The essay is about Vilém Flusser's philosophy of migration and considers the importance of custom, the permanent residence, and the material possessions required for human existence. The different languages, customs, beliefs and geographical regions lead one to understand reality in different ways, all of which influence one's self-expression. In the book, Von der Freiheit des Migranten, Vilém Flusser investigates the phenomenon of migration by way of analyzing applicable philosophical concepts, although he does not ignore some important matters related to politics (...) and the economy. (shrink)

This article seeks to introduce Flusser’s Brazilian phase to English-speaking readers. It refers to Abraham Moles, who recognized Vilém Flusser as one of the most important Brazilian philosophers, but it remembers also that probably many Brazilian academic philosophers would not agree with Moles. Flusser’s reception is complicated, for one, because Flusser was a foreigner and outsider-philosopher, and also because, in the sixties, he strongly criticized his Brazilian peers. Vilém Flusser formulated a proposal to confront the apparatus, to confront technicism and (...) to confront Brazilian “developmentism.” His proposal consists of attributing certain values, but via a philosophy ex situ, a philosophy written by an eternal and foreign foreigner. (shrink)

The dimension of sound has long been considered completely missing from Flusser's thought, thus most Flusser research has not dealt with the auditive in his work so far. This article has a two-fold approach to counter this common perception; firstly, by looking at three texts in which Flusser deals with music and sound directly – “Chamber Music”, “The Gesture of Listening To Music” and “Hörigkeit/Hoerapparate”, and secondly by looking at Flusser's key text “Crisis of Linearity” which largely ignores sound. The (...) former tackles these lesser known texts to examine how Flusser actively applied music and sound in his work, whilst the latter uses methods of sound studies to critique the absence of sound in his important media-philosophical thesis. Flusser's writings on music and sound are both striking for the contemporaneity yet problematic for their demoded appearance of concepts such as “pure music”. Insights from contemporary sound studies question the dominance of the visual in Flusser's work and the epistemological consequences this might have. (shrink)

Flusser’s brilliant multilingual essayistic style is not only based on his practice of constant translation and retranslation. In his texts, he also makes frequent use of challenging metaphors, and even annoying comparisons, through an array of rhetorical devices including, etymologies, puns based on homophones, and polysemy, in order to draw the reader’s attention to the fundamental constructed ways of our looking at the world. His philosophical rhetoric of breaking up, multiplying, mixing, comparing, combining, linking and connecting is a strategy used (...) to create novelty and surprise, that is, new information through recombination. Flusser’s philosophy operates on a meta-communicative level: language is a model, a network that captures meaning, given that all languages are artificial, and words do not primarily mean objects but other words of the same language or different languages. Languages are not primarily representational but interconnected systems of signs. Flusser calls our attention to the material side of the medium he is using, to the diversified opacity of the different languages he writes with. In sum, Flusser wants to achieve these different goals by having us embark with him as dialogical partners on an ironical journey. (shrink)

This article aims to present Sigmund Freud and Vilém Flusser not only as two thinkers with biographical similarities, but mainly as two intellectuals of converging ideas. Both developed a critical analysis of the human unease mediated by the symbolic, and both, each in his own way, tried to find solutions to deal with this unease using language as an instrument. Both saw in translation an important instrument to overcome cultural boundaries.

Researchers studying Flusser’s work are faced with two apparently distinct periods: in the first period, while he lived in Brazil, Flusser developed his theory of language; in the second period, after his return to Europe, his theory of the media and post-historical society. In this paper, I intend to explore some of the connections between those two periods of Flusser’s thought, and point to some possible ways Flusser’s view on language and translation can be applied to his conception of post-historical (...) society. Flusser's reflections suggesting that writing is coming to an end are analyzed here in an effort to identify the place occupied by translation in a world where history and writing are losing ground to technological images. In this context, this work emphasizes the crucial role assigned by Flusser to translation: that of building bridges, not only between different languages and cultures, but also between different fields and models of knowledge. (shrink)

In this text I want to define Flusser’s notion of translation. The basis for my essay are his writings on language and translation. Focussing on the power and strength of language I will relate these writings to Ernst Jünger’s book Lob der Vokale which Flusser mentions in the bibliography of Língua e Realidade. In the first part of my text I deal with the aspects of linguistic domination and submission that arise when Flusser uses a specific language. They are two (...) sides of the same medal. In the second part I discuss Flusser’s methods of translation more precisely. At this point I will take up his concept of ‘fragrancy’ which points in the same direction as Walter Benjamin’s ‘way of meaning’. Lastly I argue that Flusser’s translation activities have to be understood within his dialogical concept of freedom as an opening towards the other. (shrink)

Researchers studying Flusser’s work are faced with two apparently distinct periods: in the first period, while he lived in Brazil, Flusser developed his theory of language; in the second period, after his return to Europe, his theory of the media and post-historical society. In this paper, I intend to explore some of the connections between those two periods of Flusser’s thought, and point to some possible ways Flusser’s view on language and translation can be applied to his conception of post-historical (...) society. Flusser's reflections suggesting that writing is coming to an end are analyzed here in an effort to identify the place occupied by translation in a world where history and writing are losing ground to technological images. In this context, this work emphasizes the crucial role assigned by Flusser to translation: that of building bridges, not only between different languages and cultures, but also between different fields and models of knowledge. (shrink)

This essay deals with Vilém Flusser’s first finished, but still unpublished book Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert, which was most probably written in the mid-1950s. The book consists of six chapters linked to each other in an unfolding spiral: politics, society, science, art, philosophy and religion. Flusser’s main aim is to try to synthesize the West with the East: modern Western science with the Indian philosophy of the Vedanta, the contemporary Western concept of art with that of Chinese culture and the Judaic-Christian (...) belief with Hinduism and Buddhism. This synthesis is possible because the West and the East have been slowly evolving in the same direction. The book is remarkable both from a thematic and a stylistic point of view. It is the very origin, and construction site of Flusser’s work to come. Flusser has discarded some of the ideas put forward in Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert, but retained many others transforming them over the course of the years. Furthermore, Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert allows a reflection on the origins of Flusser’s writing, and on the development of his style. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to investigate the process through which we can produce meaning. In order to achieve such a goal, it is our intent to compare - in such a way that can be described as the friction between two pieces of wood - the ideas of Flusser and Deleuze on the subject. Therefore, the results achieved by the texts Língua e Realidade and Proust et les signes will be characterized in their differences and similarities in order (...) to describe the process of making sense as a poetic and an aesthetic gesture. Both of the authors found their reflection about word/sign in a space division between worlds of signs and cultural types of language. This contribution wants to journey through such worlds and countries not only to make a map of Flusser and Deleuze’s ideas, but also to find space divisions of our own. In this sense, the cities of Jerusalem and Athena were discovered as two different ways to think about language – and the possibility of a communication between these two tracks are the main opposition of the ideas studied here. (shrink)

Is Flusser’s Phenomenology of the Brazilian a Brazilian utopia or does it contain just the depiction of an alienated underdeveloped country? The article tries to demonstrate that it is neither. Surely, there is a utopian tradition to “thinking” Brazil. Right from its “discovery,” Brazil was a utopia. In some way, even the utopian genre as such is Brazilian, as Utopia was written within the context of the debate over the “discovery” of Brazil. But, of course, a utopia is not about (...) the other but about the self. Nevertheless, Brazil also inaugurated a rather distinct tradition of discourse: the discourse about the New. Brazil, in the sixteenth century, was the “New World” . The idea of a “New World” requires a conceptual revolution as it necessarily alters what was the world before: one’s own world ages. Flusser continues this tradition. He thinks Brazil neither as a better nor as a worse complement to the European self but as something which, from a European/“occidental” point of view, is unimaginable, absurd, even abject. His book is about the strangeness of Brazil and its disproportionate difference. To think the New is almost impossible . It seeks to overcome the categories of thinking of the self as it emerges, however, the self can only find absence and even perversion of meaning. So, to the “occidental” eye, and as an underdeveloped country, Brazil appears principally as a country of alienation. This means that the Brazilians degenerated from the human way of being perceived as “true” to the “occidental” eye. Now, Flussers asks: what is the true human way of being? It is teleological concept. The Brazilians never had a “true” being to lose. The concepts of alienation and underdevelopment, therefore, are not only inappropriate for “thinking” Brazil, they hinder the conception of the profound alterity of the country. What is unthinkable and inadmissible for these categories is the place of the New. The New, in conclusion, only appears if the self changes and becomes other. In this sense, to think the New which Brazil represents means to become Brazilian, which is what happens with the narrator-immigrant of the book. (shrink)