Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology was of interest
to Vilém Flusser primarily because of
the idea of intentionality (Gerichtetheit [directedness])
as a projective relationship between
the subject and “things themselves,” as well as
the concept of the epoché, meaning a “bracketing”
or “suspension of judgment” of all of the
self’s relations to the world in order to uncover
the epistemological structures that constitute
subjective world-directedness. According to
Flusser, it is the discovery of intentionality as
the world-directedness of the stream of consciousness
that enables one to overcome the
traditional correlation of subject and object and
make the shift from subject to “project.” He interprets
the epoché as a tool for interrupting the
flow of language, allowing one to emerge from
the absorption of being-in-the-world (In-der-
Welt-Sein). Thus, for Flusser, epoché becomes a
cipher for death and nothing while at the same
time creating the possibility of translation
(Über-Setzen) into another language – that is,
into another ontological (world) structure.
As a consequence, however, Husserl’s persistently eidetic and prelinguistic concept of experience prevented Flusser from using the epoché to the benefit of the relativity of multilinguality, and thus of the game of dialogue. Husserl, faced with the “crisis of the lifeworld” he had so aptly noted – a crisis which, for Flusser, arises primarily in the wake of the fundamental media-induced transformation of worldly relations brought about by telematics – sought refuge in the disengagement of a transcendental ego meditating on its cogitationes, rather than (in the best Jewish tradition) creatively and dialogically devising new hypotheses.
Original article by Matthias Kroß in Flusseriana