Vilém Flusser
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Vilém Flusser (May 12, 1920 – November 27, 1991) was a Czechoslovakian-born Jewish philosopher. Often considered to be a German philosopher, due to the fact that the majority of his publications are in German, he lived for a long period in Brazil and later in France, and his works are written in several different languages.
His early work was marked by discussion of the thought of Martin Heidegger, and by the influence of existentialism and phenomenology. Phenomenology would play a major role in the transition to the later phase of his work, in which he turned his attention to the philosophy of communication and of artistic production.
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[edit] Life
Flusser was born in 1920 in Prague into a family of Jewish intellectuals. His father, Gustav Flusser, studied mathematics and physics (Albert Einstein was one of his professors).
In 1938, Flusser started to study philosophy at the Juridical Faculty of the Charles University in Prague. In 1939, shortly after the Nazi occupation, Flusser emigrated to London to continue his studies for one term at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The next year, he emigrated to Brazil, living both in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. He started working at a Czech import/export company and then at Stabivolt, a manufacturer of radios and transistors.
In 1960 he started to collaborate with the Brazilian Institute for Philosophy (IBF) in São Paulo and published in the Revista Brasileira de Filosofia; by these means he seriously approached the Brazilian intellectual community. During that decade he published and taught at several schools in São Paulo, being Lecturer for Philosophy of Science at the Escola Politécnica of the University of São Paulo and Professor of Philosophy of Communication at the Escola Dramática and the Escola Superior de Cinema in São Paulo. He also participated actively in the arts, collaborating with the Bienal de São Paulo, among other cultural events.
Beginning in the 1950s he taught philosophy and functioned as a journalist, before publishing his first book Língua e realidade (Language and Reality) in 1963. In 1972 he decided to leave Brazil, because it was becoming difficult to publish because of the military regime. He lived in both Germany and the South of France. To the end of his life, he was quite active writing and giving lectures around media theory. He died in 1991 in a car accident, paradoxically while visiting his native Prague to give a lecture.
[edit] Philosophy
Flusser's essays are short, provocative and lucid, with a resemblance to the style of journalistic articles. One of the difficulties that arise while reading Flusser is the lack of references, quotations or illustrations; his articles seem to be articulated with the originality and freshness of the new. (Cubitt 2004)
Flusser’s writings relate to each other, which means that he intensively works over certain topics and dissects them into a number of brief essays. His main topics interest were: writing, the technical image, photography, migration, philosophy, media and literature, and, especially in his later years, the philosophy of communication and of artistic production.
His writings reflect his wandering life: although the majority of his work was written in German, other texts are in Portuguese and French, with scarce translation to other languages. Because Flusser's writings in different languages are dispersed in the form of articles or sections of books, his work as a media philosopher and cultural theorist is only now becoming more widely known. The first book of Flusser to be translated into English was The Shape of Things, published in London in 1999. The following year his 1983 book Towards a Philosophy of Photography also became available in English, and other work has since been translated.
Flusser's archives are held by the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne.
[edit] References
- Cubitt, S. (2004). "Review of Books from Vilem Flusser in English", Leonardo Reviews.
- Ströhl, Andreas (ed.). Writings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
- Finger, Anke (ed.). The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
[edit] External links
- Flusser Studies (Online Journal of Cultural and Media Theory with focus on Flusser's philosophies, in English, German, French, and Portuguese)
- Vilém Flusser no Brasil (in Portuguese; includes bibliography)
- Vilém Flusser Archiv (in German and English; site of the Flusser Archive at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne with many links to current work on Flusser)
