Communicology is Vilém Flusser's first thesis on his concepts of technical images and technical imagination. In this foundational text he lays the groundwork for later work, offering a philosophical approach to communication as a phenomenon that permeates every aspect of human existence. Clearly organized around questions such as "What is Communication?," "What are Codes?," and "What is Technical Imagination?," the work touches on theater, photography, film, television, and more. Originally written in 1978, but only posthumously published in German, the book is one of the clearest statements of Flusser's theory of communication as involving a variably mediated relation between humans and the world. Although Flusser was writing in the 1970s, his work demonstrates a prescience that makes it of significant contemporary interest to scholars in visual culture, art history, media studies, and philosophy.

Communicology is Vilem Flusser's first thesis on his concepts of technical images and technical imagination. In this foundational text he lays the groundwork for later work, offering a philosophical approach to communication as a phenomenon that permeates every aspect of human existence. Clearly organized around questions such as "What is Communication?," "What are Codes?," and "What is Technical Imagination?," the work touches on theater, photography, film, television, and more. Originally written in 1978, but only posthumously published in German, the book is one of the clearest statements of Flusser's theory of communication as involving a variably mediated relation between humans and the world. Although Flusser was writing in the 1970s, his work demonstrates a prescience that makes it of significant contemporary interest to scholars in visual culture, art history, media studies, and philosophy.

Is there any room left for freedom in a programmed world? This is the essential question that Vilem Flusser asks in Post-History. Written as a series of lectures to be delivered at universities in Brazil, Israel, and France, it was subsequently developed as a book and published for the first time in Brazil in 1983. This first English translation of Post-History brings to an anglophone readership Flusser's first critique of apparatus as the aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological model of present times. In his main argument, Flusser suggests that our times may be characterized by the term "program," much in the same way that the seventeenth century is loosely characterized by the term "nature," the eighteenth by "reason," and the nineteenth by "progress." In suggesting this shift in worldview, he then poses a provocative question: If I function within a predictable programmed reality, can I rebel and how can I do it? The answer comes swiftly: Only malfunctioning programs and apparatus allow for freedom. Throughout the twenty essays of Post-History, Flusser reminds us that any future theory of political resistance must consider this shift in worldview, together with the horrors that Western society has brought into realization because of it. Only then may we start to talk again about freedom.

"Science is interesting precisely because it relates to me. It is a human function just as much as breathing is: it is an existential interest. And an entirely objective science would be uninteresting, inhuman. The search for scientific objectivity is revealing itself in its continual advancement not as a search for "purity," but as pernicious madness. The present essay demands that we give up the ideal of objectivity in favour of other intersubjective scientific methods." ---- "De te fabula narratur." Thus starts this paranaturalist treatise by Vilem Flusser. Author of the seminal Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1984) and "Ins Universum der Technischen Bilder" (1985), Flusser introduces us here to an infernal creature from the oceanic abysses, our long lost relative, who slowly emerges, not from the oceans, but from our own depths to gaze spitefully into our eyes and reflect back at us our own existence. ---- Originally published only in German in 1987, this version has been edited and translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, Ph.D. candidate at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski, from the original, unpublished and extended Brazilian-Portuguese version of the manuscript recently found at the Vilem Flusser Archive at the Universitat der Kunst, Berlin. This edition is also accompanied by a selection of previously unpublished excerpts from Flusser's correspondence with Milton Vargas and Dora Ferreira da Silva, with whom he discussed the development of the present text.

This book contributes to the work of elucidating the new forms of fascism and authoritarianism that arise today in intimate relation with new mediatic and information technologies. It presents elements of the connection between capitalism and fascism and makes clear how fascism today uses the ambiguity of senses and meanings as its most efficient way of infiltrating our reality and thereby becoming unequivocal. The fascism of ambiguity is a fascism that grows the more the ambiguities and paradoxical dimensions of the contemporary situation become explicit. It departs from some lessons of history regarding both historical fascism and some of the main critical lines and thoughts produced in the beginning of the 20th Century. It shows what is new in today’s form of fascism, discussing its connection to techno-mediatic capitalism, to the dynamics of emptying meanings and senses through a technique of rendering them ambiguous and exacerbated. It outlines some guiding thoughts regarding the question of ambiguity and metapolitics today and concludes by proposing two exercises of precision, through the lenses of poetry and music, as a way to resist and counter-act the fascist metapolitics of the ambiguity of meanings and senses.

In 1939, a young Vilem 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, we must make the existential decisions that give direction to our lives.

This book contributes to the work of elucidating the new forms of fascism and authoritarianism that arise today in intimate relation with new mediatic and information technologies. It presents elements of the connection between capitalism and fascism and makes clear how fascism today uses the ambiguity of senses and meanings as its most efficient way of infiltrating our reality and thereby becoming unequivocal. The fascism of ambiguity is a fascism that grows the more the ambiguities and paradoxical dimensions of the contemporary situation become explicit. It departs from some lessons of history regarding both historical fascism and some of the main critical lines and thoughts produced in the beginning of the 20th Century. It shows what is new in today's form of fascism, discussing its connection to techno-mediatic capitalism, to the dynamics of emptying meanings and senses through a technique of rendering them ambiguous and exacerbated. It outlines some guiding thoughts regarding the question of ambiguity and metapolitics today and concludes by proposing two exercises of precision, through the lenses of poetry and music, as a way to resist and counter-act the fascist metapolitics of the ambiguity of meanings and senses.

In On Doubt, Vilem Flusser refines Martin Heidegger's famous declaration that "language is the dwelling of Being." For Flusser, "the word is the dwelling of being," because in fact, in the beginning, there was the word. On Doubt is a treatise on the human intellect, its relation to language, and the reality-forming discourses that subsequently emerge. For Flusser, the faith that the modern age places in Cartesian doubt plays a role similar to the one that faith in God played in previous eras-a faith that needs to be challenged. Descartes doubts the world through his proposition cogito ergo sum, but leaves doubt itself untouched as indubitable and imperious. His cogito ergo sum may have proved to the Western intellect that thoughts exist, but it did not prove the existence of that which thinks: one can eliminate thinking and yet continue being. Therefore, should we not doubt doubt itself? Should we not try to go beyond this last step of Cartesian doubt and look for a new faith? The twentieth century has seen many attempts to defeat Cartesian doubt, however, this doubt of doubt has instead generated a complete loss of faith, which the West experiences as existential nihilism. Hence, the emergent emptying of values that results from such extreme doubt. Everything loses its meaning. Can this climate be overcome? Will the West survive the modern age?

In 1963 Vilem Flusser presented a series of lectures at the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy (IBF) in Sao Paulo concerning the philosophy of language. The resulting ten essays would eventually be published in 1965 in the annual magazine of the Brazilian Institute of Technology and Aeronautics (ITA), and published here for the first time in book form. Flusser prepared each lecture as a response to the dialogs that followed the preceding lecture, thereby expanding and explicating his philosophy of language in an intense dialogical process. Despite the fact that the other side of the dialogue was not recorded, it becomes clear to the reader that the resulting discussions and polemics generated by the lectures progressively and profoundly changed Flusser's intended trajectory for the course. This kind of philosophy in fieri was in part the result of a group effort between all of those present, and subsequently synthesized by Flusser in every essay. As a result of this experience, Flusser adopted this dialogic method as an integral part of his future work.