Vampyroteuthis infernalis is perhaps the most important, certainly the most public, result of Bec’s and Flusser’s collaboration that lasted for more than fifteen years. Bec here presents the starting points of the publication and what the different zoosystemic plates included were supposed to signal. Each one of the abysmal creatures invented by Bec is supposed to mirror a different aspect of Flusser’s thinking.

How far apart are humans from animals—even the “vampire squid from hell”? Playing the scientist/philosopher/provocateur, Vilém Flusser uses this question as a springboard to dive into a literal and a philosophical ocean. “The abyss that separates us” from the vampire squid “is incomparably smaller than that which separates us from extraterrestrial life, as imagined in science fiction and sought by astrobiologists,” Flusser notes at the outset of the expedition. Part scientific treatise, part spoof, part philosophical discourse, part fable, _Vampyroteuthis Infernalis_ (...) gives its author ample room to ruminate on human—and nonhuman—life. Considering the human condition along with the vampire squid/octopus condition seems appropriate because “we are both products of an absurd coincidence... we are poorly programmed beings full of defects,” Flusser writes. Among other things, “we are both banished from much of life’s domain: it into the abyss, we onto the surfaces of the continents. We have both lost our original home, the beach, and we both live in constrained conditions.” Thinking afresh about the life of an “other”—as different from ourselves as the vampire squid/octopus—complicates the linkages between animality and embodiment. Odd, and strangely compelling, _Vampyroteuthis Infernalis_ offers up a unique posthumanist philosophical understanding of phenomenology and opens the way for a non-philosophy of life. (shrink)

Vilém Flusser was born in Prague. He emigrated to Brazil, where he taught philosophy and wrote a daily newspaper column in Sao Paulo, then later moved to France. He wrote several books in Portuguese and German. Writings, Into the Universe of Technical Images, and Does Writing Have a Future? have been published by the University of Minnesota Press, and the Shape of Things, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, and The Freedom of the Migrant have also been translated into English.

The depths of the sea, their obscure inhabitants and their mysteries have always been a rich source of myths and metaphors for authors and philosophers. Fables about giant squids and monstrous octopuses run through the history of literature and culture. The vampire squid is only a small phylogenetic relic, but it provides a useful model for Flusser's hybrid philosophical fiction Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. Flusser slips metaphorically into the creature’s gelatinous skin in order to speculate on the paradigms of postmodern (...) life, measuring the abyss from the inside and producing a very peculiar, experimental form of thinking and writing. In the present era of virtual reality and computer simulations, we experience fiction as the only reality. According to Vaihinger's definition, fiction is a useful construct that is precisely not real, but enables human beings to create and manipulate their environments. His philosophy of “as if” is perhaps the fullest expression of fictionalism and shows its ambivalent potential. (shrink)

This paper explores what might be called the ‘diabolical principle’ in Vilém Flusser’s work, tracing its evolution from the early Brazilian to the last German texts. If God, as the German mystics asserted, is basically ineffable and, thus, comparable to absolute nothingness, the devil – at least within Western civilization – stands for the ultimate frailty and absurdity of all human endeavors, that is, for language, history, progress, and for our continuous attempts to create sense and impose form on the (...) unfathomable nothingness surrounding us. Western history, according to Flusser, is basically a diabolical pursuit. Flusser made use of the figure of the devil in A historia do diabo, first published in 1965, reinterpreting the history of the West from a diabolical point of view. The figure of the devil, the fallen angel inhabiting the dark abysses, however, plays also a major role in Vampyroteuthis infernalis, published in 1987, twenty-two years later. In the second text, it is the devil wearing the mask of Lucifer, the light-bearer. (shrink)

The chapter deals with three species, the axolotl, Proteus anguinus, and Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, their habitats, and man’s relations with these animals, whose habitats are very different from that of man, but which at the same time inhabit the same planet on which we live together in interdependence. The author examines the human approach to these animals, which ranges from fear of the unknown, of the “power of Nature” and theoretical admiration, to the exercise of human dominance, whether in (...) the form of heroic stories or biopower with regenerative medicine. All these attitudes were very current in the past times and many still are today. The author reflects on the question of how to conceptualize the relations between entities in non-anthropocentric terms. She questions the possible posthumanist perspective that leads to understanding functional living and nonliving systems as interconnected machines. Some species live in habitats in which man cannot live. For this reason, some animals remained uncomprehensible to humans, which blossomed human imagination. With the decline of mythical thought, human objective to conqest the world has increased. Considered as being alienated from the physical and mental world of man and consequently representing a domain that resists human subjugation, this generated fearsome relationship of man towards the unknown. In addition, in the modern era, humans approached the world with instrumental rationality oriented towards utilitarian goals. Accordingly, man’s relationship to other species and to the environment became anthropocentric and often based on unequal power relations. How has human understanding of the world and of other species changed today, when we have evidence of the ecological interconnectivity of all species and their habitats at our disposal? (shrink)