A Treatise, With a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste
A classic available in English at last, this collaboration between Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec is a pioneering exploration of uncharted territory in the realm of animal cognition, philosophy, and art. At once inquisitive and whimsical, this unclassifiable book brings together some of the best work of two cutting-edge thinkers that were not only geographic but also intellectual neighbors. – Eduardo Kac
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis is a unique work that is at once literary and philosophical, poetic and scientific, and it nicely combines the imaginative fancy of the best fable with elements of science fiction and horror. Flusser's work is a hybrid creature, a marvelous and monstrous text that mirrors the fantastical creature it describes. The Vampyroteuthis holds a wonderfully strange and unhuman mirror up to the human and in so doing opens the way for a strange and novel non-philosophy of life. – Eugene Thacker, author of After Life
HOW FAR… (tovább)
A classic available in English at last, this collaboration between Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec is a pioneering exploration of uncharted territory in the realm of animal cognition, philosophy, and art. At once inquisitive and whimsical, this unclassifiable book brings together some of the best work of two cutting-edge thinkers that were not only geographic but also intellectual neighbors. – Eduardo Kac
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis is a unique work that is at once literary and philosophical, poetic and scientific, and it nicely combines the imaginative fancy of the best fable with elements of science fiction and horror. Flusser's work is a hybrid creature, a marvelous and monstrous text that mirrors the fantastical creature it describes. The Vampyroteuthis holds a wonderfully strange and unhuman mirror up to the human and in so doing opens the way for a strange and novel non-philosophy of life. – Eugene Thacker, author of After Life
HOW FAR APART ARE HUMANS FROM ANIMALS – even the „vampire from hell”? Playing the scientist/philosopher/provocateur, Vilém Flusser uses this question as a springboard to dive into a literal and a philosophical ocean. „The abyss that separates us” from the vampire quid „is incomparably smaller than that which separates us from extraterrestial life, as imagined in science fiction and sought by astrobiologists,” Flusser notes at the outset of his expedition. Part scientific treatise, part spoof, part philosophical discourse, part fable, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis offers a unique posthumanist philosophical understanding of phenomenology.
VILÉM FLUSSER (1920-1991) was born in Prague. He emigrated into Brazil, where he taught philosophy and wrote a daily newspaper column in São Paulo, then later moved to France. He wrote several books in Portuguese and German. Writings (2004), Into the Universe of Technical Images (2011) and Does Writing Have a Future? (2011) have been published by the University of Minnesota Press, and The Shape of Thinks, Towards Philosophy and Photography, and The Freedom of the Migrant have also been translated into English.
LOUIS BEC lives in Sorgues, France. His artwork explores the connections between art and science. His search for new zoomorphic types and forms of communication between artificial and natural species let to his foundingof the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste.
VALENTINE A. PAKIS teaches German at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.