How far apart are humans from animals--even the "vampire squid from hell"? Playing the scientist/philosopher/provocateur, Vilem 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 (or vampire octopus, perhaps, since Vampyroteuthis infernalis inhabits its own phylogenetic order somewhere between the two) "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...

Throughout his career, the influential new media theorist Vilem 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,...