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Língua é realidade: Vilém Flusser e a obra de Guimarães Rosa

This essay examines the dialogue established between Vilém Flusser and João Guimarães Rosa around the conception of language as the creator of reality. In this text, we discuss elements of this dialogue, We consider how the two authors understand language and how this understanding appears expressed in their works, based on essays and testimonies given by both. In this relationship between these two authors and friends, the works’ interrelation is given from the Flusser’s point of view, in his account of the profound impact of Guimarães Rosa’s literature on Flusser, who wrote several essays on it, and in seeing the experience of his own ideas about the language in Rosa’s work.

Guimarães Rosa (PDF 188.91 KB)

Trying Things Out. A Flusserian Vision for the Future of Science

My goal in this paper is twofold. First, I want to analyze two early texts by Vilém Flusser in order to explore what may have been his conceptualization of the relationship between science and philosophy. My analysis suggests that Flusser thought of both as tools to analyze reality by analyzing language. While he saw science as a (sometimes too vigorous) force forward, he viewed philosophy as what can prevent some of the negative consequences of such progress. In direct comparison, Flusser thought of science as a discourse with the purpose to provide novel information and of philosophy as what can keep objective science in check by moving the discourse into the realm of the subjective. It remains to be explored whether these results also apply to Flusser’s later writings. My second goal is to show the relationship between three aspects of modern science (crisis, contrast, and trying out) and what I see as Flusser’s early (mid 1960s) view of science in relation to philosophy and poetry.

Trying Things Out (PDF 248.99 KB)

Naturalmente artificiale. Natura e cultura a volo d’uccello

What can still be defined as ‘authentic’ in our world today? Is it true that we are interested only in the ‘authentic’ nature (or what we think it is)? What does ‘authentic’ mean in relation to nature? In the essays of Vogelflüge, published for the first time in São Paulo in 1979 under the title Natural: mente, Vilém Flusser investigates the paradoxical connection between the concepts of authenticity and artificiality, proposing the cultural form of nature as a model of the natural form of culture. As occasional philosophy from a bird’s-eye perspective, the volume is the expression of an experimental method of thought and writing, which corresponds to the essentially utopian nature of the human being. The full postmodern consciousness of the difference between the need for authenticity and the impossibility of satisfying it, explains Flusser’s phenomenologically distanced, yet poetic approach to the natural simulacra of his own culture.

Naturalmente artificiale (PDF 246.94 KB)

Für eine Mythographie der Photographie

The Mythography of Photography is written as a dialog with the Philosophy of Photography of Vilém Flusser, considering the Myths not simply as a primitive state of thinking, but as the dark residuum of all kinds of modern experience. Therefore, the present Mythography of Photography tries to reveal the main Myths which we cite when we are following the gesture of Photography and which we can find hidden in the photographical apparatus. This Mythography is strictly focused on the ancient Greek Gods and shows a specified genealogy of photography initiated by the Titan Cronus – who has been confused since antiquity with Chronos – and ending with the monster Chimera, the symbol for all illusions and phantasms. Not only can we trace a genealogic connection between these two individual figures but within the mythical tale as a whole: a trace that illuminates the inner sense and some of the main concepts of Photography.

Mythographie (PDF 292.98 KB)

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