The Political Crisis of the Anti-Zionist Jewish Intellectual
This text is an excerpt is from his latest book, which focuses on Vilém Flusser to illuminate intellectual Jewish history in the second half of the twentieth century, and vice versa. Flusser also featured prominently in his previous book, Photography and Jewish History: Five Twentieth Century Cases (UPENN Press, 2022). By examining five major twentieth-century case studies—from science and philanthropy to art—that intersect Jewish history and the history of photography, the book adapted Flusser’s theoretical framework to historical study to demonstrate how photography reshaped major concepts in twentieth-century Jewish history. individuals as isolated entities destined to face death in solitude. Flusser ultimately resolved his personal dilemma of place and belonging by embracing Bodenlosigkeit, locating its final form within the realm of aesthetics. His sharp rejection of a grounded politics stood in stark contrast to Zionism, which asserted Boden (ground/land) was a prerequisite for political life. It also diverged fundamentally from Heidegger's philosophy, which linked the "right way" to Boden but was an impossible alternative for Flusser, who viewed Nazism as a biological-technological program. Flusser’s philosophy, which notably lacks concepts such as political life, citizenship, or the state, exposes a profound political crisis in the post-Holocaust condition. His anti-nationalism and anti-Zionism stemmed from a general rejection of nationalism as a false striving for security and a specific conviction that Zionism contradicted his ideal of Judaism. While structurally echoing pre-1918 anti-Zionist thought, Flusser's views diverged from the post-1948 Jewish intellectual mainstream, ultimately offering a distinctive, marginal perspective on the evolving history of Jewish opposition to Zionism.
A Cartogram of Vilém Flusser’s Nomadism
This contribution presents a cartogram, a map that is altered so that the surface area of geographic entities are proportional to another kind of value. Developed by Clemens Jahn and Daniel Irrgang for the exhibition “Bodenlos – Vilém Flusser and the Arts” at ZKM Karlsruhe (2015) and the Academy of Arts Berlin (2015/16), it visualizes Vilém Flusser’s nomadism, a complex interplay of experiences of displacement and intersubjective connection. While the cartogram was initially disseminated within the exhibition context, it has not been widely published until now, making this special issue of Flusser Studies an opportunity for broader engagement. The publication is accompanied by an introduction written for this issue, which contextualizes the cartogram within Flusser’s biographical narrative and highlights its relevance in examining the ongoing issues of displacement and uprootedness in society.
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.