The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, and: Towards a Philosophy of Photography, and: Writings, and: The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism (review)

Imagine Walter Benjamin's essays of the 1930s had only just become available, or that Marshall McLuhan had died in obscurity but was now for the first time appearing in dribs and drabs. That is the significance of the translations of Flusser that have appeared in English in the last 5 years. Very soon, students will no longer accept an older generation being unfamiliar with Flusser, just as once we pilloried an older generation for their ignorance of Barthes and Eco. "There are the Alps," Basil Bunting once said of the Cantos. "You will have to go a long way round if you want to avoid them." Thus, too, Flusser—one of the most profound thinkers of technology and communication in the 20th century.

"The essay is not merely the articulation of a thought, but of a thought as a point of departure for committed existence . . . it transforms its topic into an enigma. It implicates itself in the topic and in its reader. This is what makes it attractive" (Writings, p. 194). By this, or pretty much any other definition, Flusser is an essayist, a writer of short, provocative, probing, but also lucid, memorable and elegant works. Four books of his writings have appeared in English, of which only Towards a Philosophy of Photography is more than a collection of essays, but even that only runs to a slender 94 pages. (According to Free Association Press, the publishers of another collection, the project to translate From Subject to Project: Becoming Human was never realized, despite the fact that it appears in several lists of Flusser's translated work.) A small number of isolated pieces have been collected in anthologies or published online. Otherwise Flusser has yet to have a major impact on the English-speaking world, though there are increasing signs that his genial, challenging mixture of information theory, phenomenology and social philosophy will become a standard reference in the years ahead, as the dominance of French post-structuralism gives way to a more catholic range of influences.

Flusser was born in 1920. In 1939, at the age of 19, he fled his native Prague, first to London, where he came across the work of Wittgenstein and Russell's mathematical philosophy, thence to Brazil, where he worked in engineering, studying Husserl and the philosophy of language in his spare time. In 1959 he took up his first academic post and began publishing philosophical essays in the São Paolo daily Folho de São. This tradition of working in public, so significant to European intellectuals like Barthes and Eco, and so sadly lacking in the United Kingdom and United States, perhaps helps explain the clarity and dialogic quality of his writing, a conversational tone inviting agreement but also challenge and discussion. Flusser's early (and thus far untranslated) Portuguese texts include books on language and reality, and on the history of the devil ("The devil and progress and history are synonyms," Writings, p. xxiii). After the 1964 Brazilian coup, Flusser began publishing more work in German, in Merkur and the Frankfürter Allgemeine. He moved to France and settled quietly in Provence in 1972. In 1983, Towards a Philosophy of Photography appeared in German...