Rainer Guldin
Rainer Guldin (Ph.D.) was Adjunct professor of German language and Culture (2003-2022) at the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano (Switzerland). He studied English and German Literature in Zurich and Birmingham (Great Britain). His diploma was dedicated to the American writer H. P. Lovecraft, and his Ph.D. thesis focused on the work of the German writer Hubert Fichte. He taught courses and held seminars at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) in Brazil (2001), the Bauhaus Universität in Weimar (Germany) (2003), and the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies of the University of Manchester (England) (2013). He was also visiting professor (Cathedra IEAT/Fundep) at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte (UFMG) Brazil (2012). In 2013 and 2015, he taught a master’s course on multilingual literature at the University of St. Gallen (HSG) (Switzerland). Publications: Philosophie des Windes. Versuch über das Unberechenbare, Bielefeld, 2023; Vilém Flusser – Hundert Zitate (together with Andreas Müller-Pohle), Berlin 2020; Metaphors of Multilingualism. Changing Attitudes towards Language Diversity in Literature, Linguistics and Philosophy, Routledge, New York, 2020; O homem sem chão: a biografia de Vilém Flusser, Annablume, Sāo Paulo (2017); and Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). Ein Leben in der Bodenlosigkeit. Biographie, transcript, Bielefeld 2017 (together with Gustavo Bernardo); Translation as Metaphor, Routledge, New York 2016 and 22018; Politische Landschaften. Zum Verhältnis von Raum und nationaler Identität, transcript, Bielefeld 2014; Spiegelgeschichten. Zu Hubert Fichtes und Hans Henny Jahnns Thomas Chatterton, Rimbaud Verlag, Aachen 2010; Wolkenformationen […] aus dem Dunst der Möglichkeiten. Zur nubigenen Einbildungskraft, Walther König, Cologne 2009; Vilém Flusser (together with Anke Finger and Gustavo Bernardo), W. Fink UTB, Paderborn 2009; Die Sprache des Himmels. Eine Geschichte der Wolken, Kadmos, Berlin 2006; Philosophieren zwischen den Sprachen. Vilém Flussers Werk, Wilhelm Fink, Munich 2005.
Articles of Rainer Guldin
Jude Sein – Being Jewish – Ser Judeu / Spuren des Jüdischen in Vilém Flussers Denken
These two short essays try to retrace some of the main interrelated nodal points of the Jewish dimension in Vilém Fusser’s thinking and writing: Bodenlosigkeit, Heimatlosigkeit, nomadism, exodus, desert, sand, dune, tent, wind, bit, grain of sand, swarm, Sabbath, epoché, mysticism, nothingness, Pilpul, Talmud, polysemy, multilingualism, and translation.
Writing Philosophy. On Vilém Flusser’s Multilingual Dialogical Style
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 (paronomasia), 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.
O homen sem chão: a biografia de Vilém Flusser, Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). Ein Leben in der Bodenlosigkeit. Biographie
O homen sem chão: a biografia de Vilém Flusser and Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). Ein Leben in der Bodenlosigkeit. Biographie are the Portuguese and the German version of a common biographical project that was conceived in Miguel Flusser’s country estate in Itatiba near São Paulo in November 2014. The two books will be published this fall by Annablume editora in São Paulo and transcript Verlag in Bielefeld (http://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4064-9/vilem-flusser-19201991), respectively. This bilingual attempt is the first book-length biography of Vilém and Edith Flusser.
E-Book Jubiläumsedition. Die erste Dekade / Flusser Studies E-book Anniversary Edition
Cotton Wool. On Flusserian Methodology and Terminology
Flusser’s attempt to cross-fertilize the disciplines, to synthesize philosophy, art and science, relies on the use of hybrid multifocal terminology. This implies the use of different strategies: horizontal expansion through multiple successive translation, vertical segmentation through etymology, integration of conceptual opposites, crossbreeding between disciplinary areas, exploration of the phonetical and visual side of words, wordplay. Furthermore, these main strategies are not used on their own, but combined in different and always changing ways with each other. The borders of words are not fixed. They overlap, mix and merge. I would like to explore Flusser’s writing and thinking styles in order to approach and understand the challenges stemming from his idiosyncratic innovative methodology.
Literary Translingualism in Switzerland: Pierre Lepori and Beat Christen
The Swiss writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer had two languages at his disposal, German and French. He hesitated, but in the end he opted to write in German. His decision was deeply affected by the outcome of the French-German war of 1870, which led to the unification of Germany. Contemporary Swiss writers do no longer have to grapple with such heartbreaking decisions. Quite the opposite is the case. In the last few decades, new forms of translingual writing have come into being. They have created a dense dialogical net across the country linking the four linguistic regions with each other. In this paper I would like to discuss two significant examples of this new form of translingual literature. Pierre Lepori combines Italian and French and Beat Christen writes in German and French.
„Ich habe gegen Pathos zu kämpfen gehabt […].“ Zur Entstehung und Bedeutung von Vilém Flussers Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert. Versuch einer subjektiven Synthese
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.
Le style c’est l’homme même: Für ein fluides grenzüberschreitendes Denken
Ménage à trois: Riflessioni sulle nozioni di diafanità e trasparenza nell’opera di Mira Schendel, Jean Gebser e Vilém Flusser
This paper deals with the difficult friendship between Mira Schendel and Vilém Flusser, as well as the role, which the life and work of the German philosopher, writer, and translator Jean Gebser (1905-1973) played in their dialogue. In the late 1960s, Schendel and Flusser studied and discussed Gebser’s Ursprung und Gegenwart. Schendel, who visited Gebser in Switzerland in 1968, was profoundly influenced by his spiritual view of reality and used his notion of Diaphanität (transparency) to interpret her own early work. In a few essays and in the Bodenlos’ chapter dedicated to Schendel, Flusser reinterpreted the work of the Brazilian artist in terms of his own philosophy, transforming the religious notion of Diaphanität into the sole ability to see beyond the surface of things. This, however, is only one aspect of the complex relationship between the three thinkers. The paper also deals with the impact the text in Bodenlos had on the Flusser-Schendel relationship and with the pervasive influence of Gebser’s work upon Flusser’s thought between the 1950s and the 1980s. Gebser’s model of the four different and succeeding Bewußtseinsmutationen, mutations of conscience, proposes five different dimensions (Bewußtseinsstrukturen), which move from zero to the fourth dimension. This notion can also be found in Flusser’s model of code evolution, which he developed in Into the Universe of Technical Images. Flusser proposed five stages, which move, however, in reverse, from four to zero dimensionality.
