Vilém Flusser - On Doubt (Univocal)

- Da dvida , 1966
Copyright Miguel Gustavo Flusser

Translated from Portuguese by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes
as On Doubt
Edited by Siegfried Zielinski

First Edition
Minneapolis 2014, Univocal Publishing

Published by Univocal
123 North 3rd Street, #202
Minneapolis, MN 55401
www.univocalpublishing.com

This book has been published with support from the
Brazilian Ministry of Culture / National Library Foundation.

Obra publicada com o apoio do
Ministrio da Cultura do Brasil / Fundao Biblioteca Nacional.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any other information storage or retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Thanks to Edith Flusser, Dinah Flusser, Miguel Gustavo Flusser,
the Vilm Flusser Archive at the Universitt der Knste Berlin,
Daniel Irrgang, and Jon Thrower.

Designed & Printed by Jason Wagner
Distributed by the University of Minnesota Press

ISBN 978-1-937561-43-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Table of Contents

by Rainer Guldin

Flusser Archive Collection

Vilm Flusser is one of the most influential thinkers of media and cultural theory as well as the philosophy of communication in the second half of the 20 th century. But unlike certain thinkers of media culture such as Marshall McLuhan or Jean Baudrillard, most of his work has yet to attain the proper attention of the reading public inside and outside the walls of the academy. One of the reasons for this is due to the singular process by which Flusser constructed his thinking and writing. He is a rare polyglot who would write his texts in various languages until he was satisfied with the outcome. Fluent in Czech, German, French, English, and Portuguese, he has left an archive full of thousands of manuscripts in various languages. The Flusser Archive Collection will be a monumental step forward in finally providing an Anglophone readership with a collection of some of Flussers most important works.

Foreword

Vilm Flusser wrote Da dvida ( On Doubt ) in the mid-sixties. However, as Gustavo Bernardo pointed out, one can find traces of its first conception in letters from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In the preface to the 1999 edition, Celso Lafer mentions that in 1965 when he was a student at Cornell University he gave a German version of A dvida to Hannah Arendt at Flussers request. Lafer mentions that he had the opportunity to look at the text with Arendt and discuss its contents. one may safely assume that Lafers statement is probably based on a mistake. It would seem that Arendt did not truly look at the more expanded version of the text. More than likely, Lafer was referring to a shorter Portuguese version of the text, which Flusser may have translated into German specifically for Arendt. This German version has been lost.

The shorter version in question Da dvida was published twice: once in 1965 for the Revista do Departamento de Humanidades of the ITA In the introduction, Flusser writes that the text represents an attempt to formulate a new sense of reality by taking language as a starting point. As with the longer version, this shorter text consists of five sections. The last section, however, bears a different title. Instead of Do sacrificio (On Sacrifice) Flusser simply called it Concluso (Conclusion). In this section, he refers to the crisis of Western culture and the necessity for creating a new language whose roots reach deep into the past, without mentioning the main idea of the chapter: sacrifice. This probably means that he wrote this specific chapter of Da dvida only after he had written the shorter version.

Besides these two versions, there is also a third text to be considered that remains unpublished, a series of sixteen lectures delivered at the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy in So Paulo during the second semester of 1963 titled Da dvida e do absurdo (On Doubt and the Absurd). In an introduction Flusser wrote in February 1965, he points out that these lectures were not originally delivered with the intention of writing a book. It was a philosophy in fieri that was to a great extent the result of teamwork with the students. His intention was not to convince, but to create doubt. The lecture cycle, which Flusser defines as an intellectual laboratory, was divided into two parts of eight lectures each. Among other subjects, Flusser discusses his philosophy of language, the importance of multilingualism and translation, death and immortality, as well as meditation and the play with words. Even if doubt is one of the central notions there is no single lecture dedicated to it.

Flusser most likely started out with a series of lectures in 1963, then moved on to a shorter preparatory version around 1964/5 and ended by writing a full-length book, probably in 1966. This specific writing strategy is not unusual for Flusser who often began a book by writing a series of loosely linked essays, which were collected in the end to form a single book.

At the Vilm Flusser Archive in Berlin, there are two identical typescripts of the first version of Flussers Da dvida one of them is a carbon copy. The present English translation is based on the copy Flusser himself corrected and annotated. The front page is entirely written by hand. It contains the title of the book and the titles of each chapter along with the he used a quote from Ovids Tristia : Ex Ponto . In the typescript of Da dvida there are a few corrections and some sentences have been underlined. To retain this annotation they have been consequently italicized.

The present edition intends to be as faithful as possible to the original text. This new English translation has succeeded in carefully reproducing Flussers intention and captures the spirit of the original, making it one of the few major texts by Flusser to finally be available to a wider international readership. The translation is not only accurate as far as wording and sentence rhythm are concerned, but it also shows great consideration and delicacy when it comes to a proper understanding of Flussers frequent word games, as well as his playful use of more than one language.

Rainer Guldin
Lugano, September 2014