writing and translation
Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) is a book about the contemporary relationship between plants and people. More specifically, it is about the conflict and potential reconciliation between a botanical, scientific, written understanding of plants, and the orally transmitted...
Is there a problem? There is. It concerns the relationship of the measurer to the measured, the scientist (or her measuring tools) to whatever-is-being-measured. Philosophers tend to view it as the relationship of subject to object, noting...
I’ve agreed to review this new book, Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (MIT, 2020), for Source Magazine, a journal of contemporary photography. It’s a very short review — just 300 words —...
Publishers don’t necessarily ask authors — or translators — before deciding what title to give any particular book. Lambert Wiesing and I assumed that the title of the German book Luxus, would be the English...
The German verb “einbilden” is ordinarily translated into English as “imagine.” But at one point in Into the Universe of Technical Images, Flusser calls attention to the difference between “einbilden” and the cognate “imaginieren”. Expressing his gratitude to Kant for...
The German word “Entwerfen” — drafting or drawing — is closely related, a kind of reversal of the verb “werfen,” which is to throw, or hurl, or toss. Flusser uses the association to describe...
Lambert Wiesing’s new book Ich für Mich: eine Phänomenolgie des Selbstbewusstseins, sounds difficult. And it is. But I have it on very good authority — namely his — that I did actually grasp the main idea, which is that self-awareness is an aesthetic awareness. Brilliant! This time, we won’t, we can’t get “aesthetic” mixed up with art!