Vilém Flusser

Vilém Flusser was a Brazilian Czech-born philosopher, writer and journalist. He lived for a long period in São Paulo (where he became a Brazilian citizen) and later in France, and his works are written in many different languages.

His early work was marked by discussion of the thought of Martin Heidegger, and by the influence of existentialism and phenomenology. Phenomenology would play a major role in the transition to the later phase of his work, in which he turned his attention to the philosophy of communication and of artistic production. He contributed to the dichotomy in history: the period of image worship, and period of text worship, with deviations consequently into idolatry and "textolatry".

Flusser was born in 1920 in Prague, Czechoslovakia into a family of Jewish intellectuals. His father, Gustav Flusser, studied mathematics and physics (under Albert Einstein among others). Flusser attended German and Czech primary schools and later a German grammar school.

In 1938, Flusser started to study philosophy at the Juridical Faculty of the Charles University in Prague. In 1939, shortly after the Nazi occupation, Flusser emigrated to London (with Edith Barth, his later wife, and her parents) to continue his studies for one term at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Vilém Flusser lost all of his family in the German concentration camps: his father died in Buchenwald in 1940; his grandparents, his mother and his sister were brought to Auschwitz and later to Theresienstadt where they were killed. The next year, he emigrated to Brazil, living both in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. He started working at a Czech import/export company and then at Stabivolt, a manufacturer of radios and transistors.

In 1960 he started to collaborate with the Brazilian Institute for Philosophy (IBF) in São Paulo and published in the Revista Brasileira de Filosofia; by these means he seriously approached the Brazilian intellectual community. Flusser had as his friend and closest interlocutor the Brazilian philosopher Vicente Ferreira da Silva. During that decade he published and taught at several schools in São Paulo, being Lecturer for Philosophy of Science at the Escola Politécnica of the University of São Paulo and Professor of Philosophy of Communication at the Escola Dramática and the Escola Superior de Cinema in São Paulo. He also participated actively in the arts, collaborating with the Bienal de São Paulo, among other cultural events.

Beginning in the 1950s he taught philosophy and worked as a journalist, before publishing his first book Língua e realidade (Language and Reality) in 1963. In 1972 he decided to leave Brazil. Some say it was because it was becoming difficult to publish because of the military regime[who?]. Others dispute this reason, since his work on communication and language did not threaten the military[who?]. In 1970, when a reform took place at the University of São Paulo by the Brazilian military government, all Lecturers of Philosophy (members of the Department of Philosophy) were dismissed. Flusser, who taught at the Engineering School (Escola Politécnica), had to leave the university as well. In 1972 he and his wife Edith settled temporarily in Merano (Tyrol). Further short stays in various European countries followed until they moved to Robion in southern France in 1981, where they remained until Flusser's death in 1991. To the end of his life, he was quite active writing and giving lectures around media theory and working with new topics (Philosophy of Photography, Technical Images, etc.). He died in 1991 in a car accident near the Czech–German border, while trying to visit his native city, Prague, to give a lecture.