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Ontogenese wiederholt Phylogenese / Ontogenesis repeats Phylogenesis

“Ontogenesis repeats Phylogenesis” is the first introductory text of Flusser’s last book Menschwerdung (Becoming human) that was not completed because of Flusser’s sudden death in 1991. It was published in 1994 by Stefan Bollmann and Edith Flusser with the collaboration of Klaus Sander in Vom Subjekt zum Projekt /Menschwerdung (From Subject to Project / Becoming Human). Two other unpublished texts from this book project were already published in Flusser Studies 12 (“Pünktlich” and “Was man wollen kann”). In “Ontogenesis repeats Phylogenesis”, Flusser compares the development of the individual to that of the species, presenting his book project as a summa of his whole thinking. It is a text written in maturity, at the end of the second millennium after Christ’s death. Flusser describes himself ironically as the last Mohican who by writing his personal history, is also writing the history of the Mohican tribe, the Jews of Prague, most of whom were annihilated in the Holocaust.

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