Essay
In the twentieth century, the diversity and the
conceptual fragmentation of our lives force our
thinking towards literary coalescence, towards extreme
nuances of feeling, in a sort of “liquefaction”
of discourse: thought freed from methodological
constraints thus rediscovers the “fluid” form of
the essay, understood here in the cognate French
sense of essai, an “attempt.” In that sense, Vilém
Flusser’s essays are both a ludic phenomenon
and a form of committed writing. In two works
written in Brazil, entitled “Ensaios” [Essays],
one unpublished and the other published in the
literary supplement of the newspaper O Estado de
São Paulo in its issue of August 19, 1967, and later
included in his Ficções Filosóficas [Philosophical
Fictions] (1998), Flusser describes its characteristic
features.
The essay, as dened by José Ortega y Gasset
and Albert Camus, should be understood, Flusser
says, as a phenomenological narrative that makes
the observer’s point of view and his or her way of
looking at things its true subject; the advantage of
the essayistic approach within philosophy would
therefore seem to be that it deals with a learned
subject in a free, lively, and vivid way – and that
is the case with all Flusser’s works. For him, the
choice of the essay form is thus connected with an
existential commitment, in a dialogic relationship
with the reader.
With his almost complete rejection of quotations, notes on sources, bibliographies, and footnotes, Flusser makes visible a style of nomadic thinking, without a basis (literally bodenlos, without firm ground) in the external form of the text. Flusser’s entire work is therefore rootless: that is what gives it its airy lightness.
Original article by Paola Bozzi