[D66] The History of the Devil

[Oto]

  The History of the Devil

*2014*
 • 
Author: 

Vilém Flusser
Translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes
Edited by Siegfried Zielinski
Distributed for Univocal Publishing 

The History of the Devil


      Tags

Theory and Philosophy
<https://www.upress.umn.edu/explore/#c10=Theory%20and%20Philosophy>,2014
Cultural Studies catalog
<https://www.upress.umn.edu/explore/#c2=2014%20Cultural%20Studies%20catalog>, 2014
Film and Media Studies catalog
<https://www.upress.umn.edu/explore/#c2=2014%20Film%20and%20Media%20Studies%20catalog>,2014
Spring <https://www.upress.umn.edu/explore/#c2=2014%20Spring>, 2014 Art
catalog <https://www.upress.umn.edu/explore/#c2=2014%20Art%20catalog>

In 1939, a young Vilém Flusser faced the Nazi invasion of his hometown
of Prague. He escaped with his wife to Brazil, taking with him only two
books: a small Jewish prayer book and Goethe’s /Faust/. Twenty-six years
later, in 1965, Flusser would publish /The History of the Devil/, and it
is the essence of those two books that haunts his own. From that time
his life as a philosopher was born. While Flusser would later garner
attention in Europe and elsewhere as a thinker of media culture, /The
History of the Devil/ is considered by many to be his first significant
work, containing nascent forms of the main themes that would come to
preoccupy him over the following decades.

In /The History of the Devil/, Flusser frames the human situation from a
pseudo-religious point of view. The phenomenal world, or “reality” in a
general sense, is identified as the “Devil,” and that which transcends
phenomena, or the philosophers’ and theologians’ “reality,” is
identified as “God.” Referencing Wittgenstein’s /Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus/ in its structure, Flusser provocatively leads the
reader through an existential exploration of nothingness as the bedrock
of reality, where “phenomenon” and “transcendence,” “Devil” and “God”
become fused and confused. So radically confused, in fact, that Flusser
suggests we abandon the quotation marks from the terms “Devil” and
“God.” At this moment of abysmal confusion, and of the downfall of all
values, we must make the existential decisions that give direction to
our lives.

$24.95 paper ISBN 978-1-937561-22-2
220 pages, 4 9/10 x 7 5/8, May 2014

Series:UNIVOCAL <https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/series/univocal>


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