Abstract

In this paper, I analyze philosophical, rhetorical, and fictional strategies of some of Flusser’s texts in Ficções filosóficas [Philosophical Fictions], aiming to discuss how Flusser confronted the intersection between fiction and philosophy. I argue that Flusser is very aware of issues of form and style of philosophical texts and I emphasize Flusser’s powerful particularities in this matter. On the one hand, Flusser’s unorthodoxies — constant alteration of points of views, irony, sarcasm, acting against the apparatus, etc. — are used as strategies of thought and criticism, in contrast with the more technical philosophical practice institutionalized in Brazilian Universities, which occurred simultaneously with the publication of some of Flusser’s texts. These academic philosophers sacrificed literature in the name of a newborn and very European philosophical community established in São Paulo. They were against the ancient, pompous, and elitist style of conceptual writing, but also opposed to other forms of conceptual knowledge, such as Eastern or indigenous philosophy. On the other hand, the particularities of Flusser’s writing distinguish him from other already classical and contemporary ways of understanding what an essay is, for instance, in Theodor Adorno, who does not disrupt the contraposition between subject and object, theory and art. This distinction demands a reconsideration of philosophical styles beyond the essay that inhabit the intersection between fiction and philosophy.