A Forgotten Publication Project: Vilém Flusser’s “The Fairy Tale of Truth”
In the 1990s, the Bollmann Verlag planned to publish a complete edition of Vilém Flusser’s oeuvre. However, in the mid-nineties, due to financial difficulties, this plan had to be abandoned. In 1996, was published the last volume under the catchy title Kommunikologie. However, the material for another complete volume had already been assembled by Edith Flusser, Klaus Sander and Vera Schwamborn. The working title was Das Märchen von der Wahrheit. Glossen und Philosophiefiktionen (The Fairy Tale of Truth: Glosses and Philosophical Fictions). The first section contained a collection of twenty-seven philosophical fictions and the second nearly all the texts of the daily satirical column Posto Zero that were published from January 22 to April 12, 1972, shortly before Flusser’s return to Europe. For the publication project, Edith Flusser had translated practically all the Portuguese texts into German. The essay also discusses five of these previously unpublished texts in more detail.
Naturalmente artificiale. Natura e cultura a volo d’uccello
What can still be defined as ‘authentic’ in our world today? Is it true that we are interested only in the ‘authentic’ nature (or what we think it is)? What does ‘authentic’ mean in relation to nature? In the essays of Vogelflüge, published for the first time in São Paulo in 1979 under the title Natural: mente, Vilém Flusser investigates the paradoxical connection between the concepts of authenticity and artificiality, proposing the cultural form of nature as a model of the natural form of culture. As occasional philosophy from a bird’s-eye perspective, the volume is the expression of an experimental method of thought and writing, which corresponds to the essentially utopian nature of the human being. The full postmodern consciousness of the difference between the need for authenticity and the impossibility of satisfying it, explains Flusser’s phenomenologically distanced, yet poetic approach to the natural simulacra of his own culture.