Vilém Flusser

Abstract

Vilém Flusser was born in Prague on 12 May 1920. He grew up in a family of Jewish intellectuals, and began studying philosophy in 1939. Facing the German Occupation, he and his wife Edith first fled to London, and then settled in Brazil. During the 1940s and 1950s, he worked in industry. In 1959 he became Lecturer in the Philosophy of Science at the University of São Paulo, and began publishing his first academic essays and newspaper articles. His first book, Língua e realidade (Language and reality), appeared in 1963. Throughout the 1960s, Flusser’s work addresses his formative interests in existentialism, phenomenology and linguistics, but his general concern with communication leads him increasingly towards media and technology, subjects on which his reflections were far- reaching and prescient of radical changes in the organization of human society. In 1972, owing to conflict with Brazil’s military dictatorship, the Flussers move to Europe, eventually settling in Robion in the south of France. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s his books, articles, courses and conference interventions multiply, written by him in five languages, and also disseminated through translation. Currently, five books exist in English: Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983; English trans. 2000), The Shape of Things (1993; English trans. 1999), From Subject to Project (1994; English trans. 1996), The Freedom of the Migrant (1994; English trans. 2003) and Writings (2002). Flusser died in a car accident on 27 November 1991, shortly after revisiting Prague for the first time in over fifty years.