Auschwitz
As a Jew born in Prague who had to go into exile
to avoid being killed, Vilém Flusser created an
important theory about the attempt of the German
Nazis to exterminate the Jews. Flusser’s
father was beaten to death in Buchenwald
concentration camp and his mother and sister
were both murdered in Auschwitz. According to
Flusser, post-history is not only a consequence
of the telematic revolution and synthetic images,
but also of the tragic defeat of Western reason in
Auschwitz. This event was embedded in the logic
of the West.
As he wrote in chapter “The Ground We Tread”
in Post-History: “[…] our situation is in fact incomparable
to any other. That is because an incomparable,
unheard of, never before seen event
happened recently, which emptied the ground we
tread. Auschwitz. Other posterior events; Hiroshima,
the Gulags, are nothing but variations of
the first. Therefore every attempt to grasp the
present leads to the following questions: how
was Auschwitz possible? How can we live after
this? Such questions […] relate to everyone who
takes part in our culture. Because what is so incomparable,
unheard of, never before seen and
therefore incomprehensible in Auschwitz, is that
it was there that Western culture revealed one of
its inherent virtualities. Auschwitz is a characteristic
realization of our culture.” (Post-History,
2013, p. 4)
Auschwitz reveals the affinity of the West to apparatuses. The utopia of the Western technological dream taken to extremes is the nightmare that was Auschwitz (ibid., pp. 8–9). Flusser’s communicology project becomes an attempt “to project ourselves out of that project,” “[o]ut of the history of the West” (ibid., p. 10). The information revolution of synthetic images should be perceived as an “answer to Auschwitz” (“We Shall Survive in the Memory of Others,”, 2010, p. 35). Our task is to prevent Auschwitz from happening in the future.
Original article by Márcio Seligmann-Silva in Flusseriana