Gabriel Salvi Philipson
Gabriel Salvi Philipson is currently a visiting researcher in the Vilém Flusser Archive at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, teaching a seminar about Flusser’s Angenommen. He is pursuing a post-doctoral research in Language Studies at PUC-SP (Brazil), on literary writing on nature and the (im)possibilities of literature in the anthropocene through the works of Graça Graúna, Intermundial Holobiente and Ruth Guimarães. He holds a PhD in Literary Theory and History at the Universidade de Campinas (Brazil), supervised by Marcio Seligmann-Silva, with a research internship at the Freie Universität Berlin, supervised by Susanne Zepp, funded by CNPq, FAPESP and DAAD, investigating the connection between decolonial theory and philosophy of technology based on the theoretical and philosofictional works of Vilém Flusser. He also works as a translator and has translated Flusser’s Angenommen into Portuguese. Finally, he holds a bachelor’s degree (2013) and a licentiate degree (2014) in Philosophy and a master’s degree (2017) in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil).
Articles of Gabriel Salvi Philipson
Perspectivação e temporalidades (cosmo)técnicas (imaginativas): o livro-roteiro Angenommen como a culminação da escritura flusseriana / Perspectivation and (Cosmo)technical (Imaginative) Temporalities ...
This paper analyzes key passages of Vilém Flusser’s Angenommen from the point of view of the functioning of his writing. Starting out from the Flusserian theory of techno-imagination, the notion of anthropophagy (Oswald de Andrade), the concept of techno-diversity proposed by Yuk Hui and the Nietzschean doctrine of the eternal return the article proposes that the Angenommen constitutes a fundamental contribution to the problem of the destiny of philosophy. The text fits into a tradition of texts that proposes an intimate relationship between the eternal return, ghostliness, revolution, technique, and possibilities/potentialities. From Leibniz, to Benjamin, as well as Nietzsche and Blanqui, the idea of a possible world focused on the significance of temporality in Modernity. Angenommen institutes a circularity, a potential eternal return in the singular events that go beyond the circularity of past and future history based on the fictional hesitation of (un)probable possibilities. The apparent quasi-dialectical movement of the book proves to be a hellish circle from which there is no way out. The paradox at the heart of the work is that the freedom of imagination of (un)probable heterochronotopic scenarios is constrained by the instinctual repetition of anti-entropic principles. The (im)probably (im)possible phantasmagories replicate, as philosofictions, reality as a trauma.
Seismic Cyst: Vilém Flusser’s Journalistic Philosophical Quasi-Poetry and Oswald de Andrade’s Telefonemas in the Corpus of Brazilian Philosophy
This paper relates Vilém Flusser's and Oswald de Andrade's philosophical approaches by examining and comparing Flusser's quasi-poetical way of writing philosophy in newspapers articles of the 1960s with de Andrade's Telefonema, newspapers articles of the 1940s and 1950s. It is analyzed their supposedly minor texts, setting the principle that the manifestos and the large theoretical novels that both composed could be present as a horizon of analysis. If it was to work with minor authors within a minor philosophy, it would be necessary to go even more to the micro. The purpose was to follow the fleeting traces of their literary-philosophical machines and their (dis)articulation with (neo)colonial powers. The assumption is that there is a similarity in the way they deal with the question of otherness, which is manifest in the approach that they do towards philosophy, literature and journalistic activity. They not only share several criticism and frustrations about the philosophical program that was intended to be established in Brazil but are also to be seen as exploring the boundaries between thought and literature, announcing and expecting philosophies to come.
Flusser para além do ensaio: de outros modos possíveis de habitar a intersecção entre ficção e filosofia
In this paper, I analyze philosophical, rhetorical, and fictional strategies of some of Flusser’s texts in Ficções filosóficas [Philosophical Fictions] (1999), aiming to discuss how Flusser confronted the intersection between fiction and philosophy. I argue that Flusser is very aware of issues of form and style of philosophical texts and I emphasize Flusser’s powerful particularities in this matter. On the one hand, Flusser’s unorthodoxies — constant alteration of points of views, (auto)irony, sarcasm, acting against the apparatus, etc. — are used as strategies of thought and criticism, in contrast with the more technical philosophical practice institutionalized in Brazilian Universities, which occurred simultaneously with the publication of some of Flusser’s texts. These academic philosophers sacrificed literature in the name of a newborn and very European philosophical community established in São Paulo. They were against the ancient, pompous, and elitist style of conceptual writing, but also opposed to other forms of conceptual knowledge, such as Eastern or indigenous philosophy. On the other hand, the particularities of Flusser’s writing distinguish him from other already classical and contemporary ways of understanding what an essay is, for instance, in Theodor Adorno, who does not disrupt the contraposition between subject and object, theory and art. This distinction demands a reconsideration of philosophical styles beyond the essay that inhabit the intersection between fiction and philosophy.