Gestures

Gestures

Vilem Flusser

Translated by Nancy Ann Roth

An analysis of gestures great and small, from a renowned media theorist—available in English for the first time

224 Pages, 6 x 9 in

  • Paperback
  • 9780816691289
  • Published: July 4, 2014
BUY
  • eBook
  • 9781452941899
  • Published: June 1, 2014
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Details

Gestures

Vilem Flusser

Translated by Nancy Ann Roth

ISBN: 9780816691289

Publication date: July 4th, 2014

224 Pages

8 x 5

"Flusser transforms gesture to the level of metaphor, offering deep, sometimes metaphysical, interpretation of the human condition.  Though 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



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.


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.

Contents

Translator’s Preface

Gesture and Affect: The Practice of a Phenomenology of GesturesBeyond Machines (But Still within the Phenomenology of Gestures)The Gesture of WritingThe Gesture of SpeakingThe Gesture of MakingThe Gesture of LovingThe Gesture of DestroyingThe Gesture of PaintingThe Gesture of PhotographingThe Gesture of FilmingThe Gesture of Turning a Mask AroundThe Gesture of PlantingThe Gesture of ShavingThe Gesture of Listening to MusicThe Gesture of Smoking a PipeThe Gesture of TelephoningThe Gesture of VideoThe Gesture of SearchingAppendix: Toward a General Theory of Gestures

Translator’s NotesIndex