Suponhamos: cenários para uma ética flusseriana / Suppose that: Scenarios for a Flusserian Ethics
This essay focuses on the formal aspects of Flusser’s Angenommen. The first part provides the general outline of the book and the second discusses its relationship to other initiatives by Flusser, both authorial (Vampyroteuthis Infernalis) and collaborative (Joan Fontcuberta’s plants, Louis Bec’s sulfanogrades and Guimarães Rosa’s garças). The third part discusses the ethical dimension of the book especially Flusser’s notion of engagement. The idea is to associate the positions of the two main characters, the terrorist and the futurologist, with Flusser’s own situation when he decided to leave Brazil and return to Europe in the early 1970s. Flusser rejects engagement (the terrorist) and scientific theory (the futurologist), but also seems to suggest that the third position – that of the artist –, the ideal synthesis, is not yet given. The artist’s situation has no place, it is improbable, but it is not utopian - without topos. Utopia is next to science fiction. It is a projection of an imaginary world that does not serve as knowledge. Flusser’s focus, in Angenommen and other works is on the improbability of love, or, as he points out in a letter to Mira Schendel, on aisthesis as a method of political criticism. Flusser's ethics have not yet reached the present.
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.
The Art of the Vampyroteuthis - Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis infernalis: His Art
In this excerpt from his hybrid text of philosophical fiction, Vilém Flusser examines the history and future of human art and communication from the perspective of a giant deep-sea squid, the Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Fictionalizing some of the accepted biological details about the extant species of squid, Flusser oscillates between an encyclopedic description of the animal’s anatomical and behavioral characteristics and a cultural history of human art making. He proposes the world of the Vampyroteuthis as a model for human communication in the age of television, film and digital images. With his skill for de-familiarizing everyday aspects of human life, Flusser holds the molluscan creature up to his reader as a mirror in which human behavior can be considered from an opposing, almost inhuman perspective.