Construindo pontes: Ser judeu para os outros
This text examines Flusser’s conception of two kinds of Jews – one being a Jew to other Jews and the other a Jew to the world. Flusser opts for second possibility. For him, then, to be a Jew means to build bridges. Writing is a way of building bridges between one’s own Jewish experience and universal philosophical thought. The article focuses on Flusser’s correspondence with Milton Vargas and David Flusser in the two last years of his life, showing how his thoughts of impending death and the anguish of the Holocaust transformed his personal experience.
Flusser e as ondas abissais
In Vilém Flusser’s books, Judaism is viewed not only as a religion, but also as a specific culture that allows the author to treat the issue of evil in universal terms from a perspective that reveals itself to be Jewish and Post-Shoah.
Até a terceira e a quarta geração: a experiência do holocausto como fundamento das teorias de Vilém Flusser / Unto the Third and Fourth Generation. The Experience of the Holocaust as the Basis of Vilém Flusser’s Philosophy / Do třetího i čtvrtého pokolení
This essay focuses on the fundamental significance of the Holocaust in Vilém Flusser’s life and thinking. In his still unpublished Até a terceira e a quarta geração (Unto the Third and Fourth Generation) written in the early 1960ies, the problem of Nazism is explicitly thematized and linked to the development of Western society. The abandonment of a religious view of the world in the Renaissance led to the loss of a grounding sense of reality, which was filled up by science (the new religion) and later on by nationalism. These developments eventually led to the First and the Second World War, as well as to Auschwitz and Adolf Eichmann as the ideal representatives of the apparatus and the functionary.