I was first drawn to clouds and winds – the two phenomena are inseperable – in the early 1980s when I was living in Witikon, a district of Zurich overlooking the lake and the western shore. At that time, I was working on my Ph.D. about the German writer Hubert Fichte. This interest resurfaced in the early 2000s when I was living in Lugano-Paradiso with a view of the city, Monte Brè, Monte Generoso, the bay and the beginning of the eastern branch of the lake leading to the small Italian town of Porlezza. From the balcony of the apartment the slowly moving spectacular and ever changing cloud caravans driven by the winds could be seen from afar.

My theoretical interest in clouds and winds began in the late 1990s with the reading of Michel Serres’ Hermes V. Le Passage du Nord-Ouest, which eventually led to the writing of Die Sprache des Himmels. Eine Geschichte der Wolken (2006). In this book, the winds also play a role, however, the main focus is on clouds. According to Serres, clouds are transient formless fields of possibilities from which new information can emerge. In this sense, they represent one of the central metaphors for present day global society. The internet is a gigantic cloud and the growing importance of the new technology of cloud computing is everywhere to be seen. The cloud is, furthermore, an eminently interdisciplinary phenomenon which has attracted the interest of all those working on theoretical borders.

I later discovered that Vilém Flusser had also used the cloud and the wind as metaphors. In January 2008, I held a speech at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. This Flusser Lecture was published in 2009 as „Wolkenformationen […] aus dem Dunst der Möglichkeiten. Zur nubigenen Einbildungskraft. An expanded and illustrated version of this text was published in Flusser Studies 29 (November 2020) with a new title: „Eine Wolke von Zukunft“. Zur nubigenen Einbildungskraft in Vilém Flussers Werk”. One of the six texts I contributed to the glossary Flusseriana. An Intellectual Toolbox that was published in English, Portuguese and German in 2015 was about the wind in Flusser´s work. See also the short text Wind and Desert connecting the wind to landscape. The chapter “Silvanismus und Saharismus Überlegungen zum Landschaftsvergleich” (Silvanism and Saharism. Reflection on Landscape Comparison) in my book Politische Landschaften. Zum Verhältnis von Raum und nationaler Identität (2014) is a further discussion of the metaphorical dimension of the desert that ties in with its connection to the wind.

In Philosophie des Windes. Versuch über das Unberechenbare (2023), I shifted the main focus towards the wind. Both Serres and Flusser used the wind as a metaphor for communication processes. Chapter five of the book, “Von Winden und Wolken: Himmelsschlacht und Möglichkeitsfeld” (On Winds and Clouds: Battle in the Sky and Field of Possibilities), is a discussion of the metaphorical relevance of clouds and winds in philosophy. A part of it is dedicated to the specificity of Flusser´s and Serres´ use of these two metaphors. Further metaphorical dimensions of the connection between wind and desert are explored in chapter eight “Der Wind des Wahnsinns: Plötzlichkeit und Exzess” (The Wind of Madness: Abruptness and Excess) and nine “Der Wind des Nomadischen: Politik und Kommunikation” (The Wind of Nomadism: Politics and Communication).

Instead of a cultural history like Die Sprache des Himmels. Eine Geschichte der Wolken, Philosophie des Windes. Versuch über das Unberechenbare is a philosophical approach to the phenomenon of the wind and to weather in general.