Diaspora
Diaspora designates the living space and environment
of a religious, national, and in a
figurative sense an intellectual minority, and
etymologically also includes the meaning of
dispersion, of being dispersed. Vilém Flusser’s
terminology relating to diaspora, which is never
clearly dened in his texts, is closely connected
to his uneasy identity as a Jew. Uneasy, because
this identity is always imposed by others
and represents a perspective from the outside,
who see Flusser, as a Jew, situated within a cultural,
historical, and religious framework that he
was unable to shape himself. He was not free to
recognize himself as Jewish – others made that
decision for him. For that reason and with years
of experience as an exile and displaced person
behind him, Flusser defines his own identity as
bodenlos [having no rm ground], which speaks to a rootlessness that oscillates between freedom
and responsibility, between “free from
what?” to “free for what?” and between cutting
knots or cords and creating new ties or building
bridges. Figuratively and metaphorically, in his
life and in his work.
Rejecting the negative connotations of both Heimatlose, displaced persons, and Kosmopoliten, cosmopolites, Flusser argues for the notion of a Weltbürgertum, a worldly, internationalized educated middle class group for which Jews will act as catalysts – a liberating experience that will eliminate ethnic differences, as he asserts in Jude sein [Being Jewish] (1995). Diasporic rootlessness, life without an own territory, also informs Flusser’s essayistic and philosophical works. Although never specified as such, diasporic thinking could serve as a label for Flusser’s thought processes for it delineates his evolved phenomenological approach to those topics he chose to write about, which he circles around from multiple perspectives. He was a diasporic thinker, who maintained a dialogue with both the contingencies and the freely elected loyalties that his rootlessness unfailingly presented to him.
Original article by Anke Finger in Flusseriana