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 separetes us" from the vampire squid "is incomparably smaller than that wich separetes us from extraterrestrial life, as imagined in science fiction and sought by astrobiologists," Flusser notes at the outset of his expedition. Part scientific treatise, part spoof, part philosophical discourse, part fable, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis offers a unique posthumanist philosophical understanding of phenomenology.


