Gestures by Vilém Flusser

Gestures by Vilém Flusser

Throughout his career, the influential new media theorist VilÉm Flusser kept the idea of gesture in mind: that people express their being in the world through a sweeping range of movements. He reconsiders familiar actions-from speaking and painting to smoking and telephoning-in terms of particular movement, opening a surprising new perspective on the ways we share and preserve meaning. A gesture may or may not be linked to specialized apparatus, though its form crucially affects the person who makes it. These essays, published here as a collection in English for the first time, were written over roughly a half century and reflect both an eclectic array of interests and a durable commitment to phenomenological thought. Defining gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” Flusser moves around the topic from diverse points of view, angles, and distances: at times he zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement such as taking a photograph, shaving, or listening to music; at others, he pulls back to look at something as vast and varied as human “making,” embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass manufacturing. But whatever the gesture, Flusser analyzes it as the expression of a particular form of consciousness, that is, as a particular relationship between the world and the one who gestures.

"Flusser transforms gesture to the level of metaphor, offering deep, sometimes metaphysical, interpretation of the human conditionThough it resists being put in a particular disciplinary niche, Gestures will surely become a standard for the many scholars who have already debated or acknowledged the value of Flusser’s claims."—CHOICE

"Flusser’s book transcends the time in which it was written."—International Journal of Communication

"Flusser's writings have a more accessible style, offering precise examples and analogies to specify key concepts. For this reason, the work of Flusser, especially Gestures, eclectically engages with deconstructive paradigms of philosophy at a level accessible to undergraduate students and academics."—Screen Bodies

VilÉm Flusser (1920–1991) was born in Prague; emigrated to Brazil, where he taught philosophy and wrote a daily newspaper column; and later moved to France. Among his many books that have been translated into English are Does Writing Have a Future?, Into the Universe of Technical Images, and Writings, all from Minnesota.


Nancy Ann Roth is an arts writer and critic based in the UK. She previously translated Does Writing Have a Future? and Into the Universe of Technical Images.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780816691289
ISBN 10	0816691282
Title	Gestures
Author	Vilém Flusser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Minnesota Press
Year published	2014-07-04
Number of pages	224
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable