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Jogos / Spiele / Games

In this essay, Flusser identifies human beings as homo ludens, the playing animal, asserting that the capacity to play is their defining feature.  He notes at the outset that it is no longer the difference between humans and animals that is at issue, but a difference between humans and their apparatuses.  In supporting his claim, he defines a game as system of elements that regularly combine, then goes on to describe categories of games within which the whole of human communication can be aligned. He focusses on three examples -- chess, language (he chooses Portuguese), and science, using them to introduce terms, e.g. “elements,” “competence,” “repertoire” and “universe,” that apply to games in general but also facilitate comparison and contrast.  Above all, he underscores the need for human beings to be aware of the games in which they participate, for only in such an awareness is it possible to actually play a game -- that is, expand and change it, create something new -- as opposed to being played by it, caught in the operations of a fixed, stolid, apparatus.  First published in German in 1968, the text introduces terms that Flusser developed further in subsequent writings. 

Jogos (PDF 129.9 KB)
Spiele (PDF 139.23 KB)
Games (PDF 240.45 KB)

Rethinking Interology with Flusser

Motivated as much by a deep concern with the rapidly evolving human condition as by intellectual curiosity, this article reveals the problem-driven and futurological nature of Flusserian interology [Deleuze]. It proposes that compared to traditional ontology, the notion of interality and the dynamics of interology offer us a more adequate way of thinking through our situation in the here and now and in the immediate future. The secondary motive is to turn Flusser’s media philosophy into a pointillist verbal art, a techno-ethics, and an intertopia befitting the digital era.

Rethinking Interology (PDF 465.71 KB)

O filósofo que gostava de jogar: o pensamento dialógico de Vilém Flusser e a sua busca pela liberdade

This article examines the role of playing in Vilém Flusser's thinking. In addition to a deeper conceptual insight, this analyses conducted on the philosopher's work investigates how he understood play as a specific manner of being in the world. In this regard, this paper aims to gain insight into how Flusser accepted this kind of existence for himself. His texts, his thoughts and his methods are based on a playful attitude towards culture, language, his references and towards his readers. A closer look at this specific aspect of Flusser's writing shows how the writing itself materializes the philosophy it suggests. The analyses are based on three key concepts: dialog, image as a concept, and the bureaucrat/employee; concepts which allow the understanding of how the playful dimension of Flusser's thinking can be important in order to figure out how he sees in the concept of the Homo Ludens a feasible ethical posture for the practice of freedom in contemporary society.

O filósofo (PDF 167.07 KB)

Juego e imaginación en Vilém Flusser

In several texts Vilém Flusser argues that if we had to define some specificity that characterizes the human being nowadays it would be homo ludens, because of the multiple cultural revolutions that have occurred, which have radically altered man’s existence, especially his imagination. The argument outlined in this paper is that the category of play not only reveals a specificity of contemporary man, but also represents his philosophical gesture. It is a central notion for Flusser’s criticism of the apparatus as a technical device.

Juego e imaginación (PDF 223.74 KB)

Vilém Flusser: Brasil y la búsqueda del sujeto-proyecto

Vilém Flusser’s intellectual and academic development took place during thirty one years he lived in Brazil. This period was especially relevant in the consolidation of his philosophical projects. This essay works on the hypothesis that Flusser’s analysis of the human condition in the post-historic, post-human, and post-modern ages, as well as the phenomenological search of what he named the new kind of human being, has its roots in this Brazilian period. One of the most read and analyzed subjects of the last European period of this author – the transformation of the subject into a project – acquires new meanings if it is considered and approached from the internal logic of the philosophical bond between these two stages or periods.

Brasil (PDF 293.12 KB)

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