A metamorfose de Kafka em Flusser
The most famous literary metamorphosis is Kafka’s short eponymous tale published in 1915. For more than a hundred years now, the first sentence of The Metamorphosis has been provoking an infinite series of metamorphoses: in culture, literature, as well as in readers and writers. Among the writers most affected by the event, we find Vilém Flusser who turned himself into Brazilian and foreigner in the world at the same time. Flusser transformed philosophy into a philosophical fiction and charged it with the same sardonic irony we associate with Kafka’s fiction. Because of his metamorphoses, he became a fictional character himself, as Rainer Guldin and I pointed out in the biography we wrote about him. Sérgio Paulo Rouanet called Vilém Flusser ironically a Meta-Švejk. Flusser did not consider himself a post-philosopher – a Post-Husserl or Post-Vaihinger – but rather a Post-Kafka. In this sense, his philosophy is a kind of a post-Kafkaesque fiction.
Meta-Švejk
This text is an extract of a planned bilingual Portuguese (O homem sem chão) and German (Ein Leben in der Übersetzung) biography of Vilém and Edith Flusser by Gustavo Bernardo and Rainer Guldin. It deals with Flusser’s Czech origins from the point of view of Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) and Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk written between 1921 and 1923.