Mountains and Clouds: Flusser’s Buddhism
Flusser encountered Zen Buddhism in the 1950s through his friend Alex Bloch who was assistant to a Zen monk. What would this mean for Flusser’s thinking and writing? This essay engages in the contradictory project of exploring Flusser’s Buddhism both from within his writing and from the outside, through Buddhist texts Flusser would not have read. Flusser’s experiences with meditation and Buddhist thought are described in autobiographical passages of Groundless and The History of the Devil, including some unusual moments of “enlightenment.” How did these linger in Flusser’s philosophical speculations? Flusser’s phenomenological essay “Mountains” from Natural:Mind is read against the work of Chinese poet Du Fu and Zen master Eihei Dogen, and the distinction between nothingness and emptiness is considered.
From God’s Death and Nothingness to the Re-Creation of the World: Vilém Flusser’s Intertextual Games
The essay deals with several motifs of Vilém Flusser’s philosophy focusing on the notion of nothingness – ontological horizon, conversation and establishment of being. The essay attempts to reconstruct the fundamentals of Flusser’s theory of being, based on an analysis of his fragmentary statements, which form a coherent whole grounded in a utopian vision of information society influenced by Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Ingarden, Sartre and Levinas. Flusser’s writings are intertexts full of more or less concealed allusions, transformations, and polemics, as well as of congenial convergences with texts and ideas of other authors.