Books

Open for the plurality of all forms of imagination and knowledge, DIAPHANES MAGAZINE connects an interest in current tendencies with deep-rooted research, the power of fiction with nuanced judgment, aesthetic excitability with essayistic sharpness.

avant-garde
literature
contemporary culture
discourse
contemporary art
art
art criticism

Discourse

Slavs and Tatars

Why the Backwards Smile?

To what extent can a revolution of the inner world impact the external, material world surrounding us?

Humanities

Hauke Branding (ed.), Julian Volz (ed.)

Theoretical perspectives in conversation with artistic perspectives on Queer liberation in a transnational context.

orientalism
contemporary art
queer theory
contemporary art
Postcolonial Studies
desire

Magazine

Surrogacies

Myths and visions of motherhood and fathering, brings together artistic and theoretical positions on reproduction and communication, gender and genus, addressing and conception.

gender
contemporary art
feminism
aesthetics
queer theory
body
motherhood
father figure
mother figure

Magazine Online

News + Events

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:<br>Art, Magazine, Books

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

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New releases

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback (ed.), David Payne (ed.): Breaking Grounds

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: In Touch: Encounters between Art and Research

Hauke Branding (ed.), Julian Volz (ed.): Radical Desires

Kevin B. Lee (ed.): The Future of Survival

Observing the Spectator

Article

The Moving Spectator in Medieval Italian Art

This essay traces the importance of monumental art in Erwin Panofsky’s evolution of perspectival space by critically analyzing his concept of a Raumkasten (»space-box«). In Panofsky’s 1920s work, the teleological development between bodies and space from the 11th to the 14th centuries plays a crucial role in the history of...

Christopher Lakey

From Place to Space

Article

Disabling / Enabling Photography

The article examines the representation of people with cognitive and physical disabilities in two sets of photographs, (a) the commercial portraits of American and European show freaks from the 19th and early 20th century and (b) artistic images made by American photographer Diane Arbus between the 1950s and the 1970s.It...

Lars Nowak

Disabling / Enabling Photography

Article

On Holocaust and Art

Slavoj Žižek discusses the aestheticization of the Holocaust. Contrary to the much-debated arguments which call into question the presentability of the unpresentable, Žižek defends the idea that an »aestheticization« of the Holocaust trauma is imperative. It is not poetry that has become impossible after Auschwitz, but prosa – because it... ABO

Slavoj Žižek

»Description without a Place«

Article

Complicity in Spectatorship

The special case of lustful murdering soldiers of King Herod and the introduction of spectators on frescos by Giotto and pulpits by the Pisani are at the core of this contribution, which poses the question: How is cruelty visualized in Italy around 1300? The introduction of detached spectators in opposition...

Beate Fricke

Complicity in Spectatorship

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

Strangeness is everywhere, but strangers are only where we define them.

ABO DE FR

Current Texts

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

Hurrah!

We rehearsed the crowd scenes in the Winter Palace, in the Throne Room and the Armorial Hall.

ABO

Current Texts

Philosophy is found wanting. It is considered anachronistic, some say dead. The tradition is in ruins. ABO

Stephen Barber

J.G. Ballard’s self-declared ‘Immodest Proposal’ for a global war-alliance to exact the destruction of America demonstrates the provocatory zeal of his last fiction plans, as well as their enduring prescience. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

“If you love your family, you want family abolition for them!” ABO DE

Michele Pedrazzi

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
ACCESS DE FR

New releases

Allison Grimaldi Donahue: The History of Breathing

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Last Writings of Antonin Artaud

Anna Kipke (ed.), Iryna Kovalenko (ed.), ...: Drafts in Action

Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman: Before & After

Thomas Köck: un gran casino (ta pissà adoss l’ürocc)

Arts

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

This issue explores practices of human and non-human substitution.

What claims the place of the nuclear family in the face of hybrid kinships and social freezing? What could new elective kinships be in times of chatbots and pseudonymisation? Is this the time for surrogate mother tongues and extra-human rhetorics of surrogation? Sophie Lewis claims a gestational communism and hunts our grannies. Barbara Vinken reflects on spiritual motherhood, Luciana Parisi on human automata and gendered proxies. For Zuzana Cela, language is a foreign body that can be invaginated. Werner Hamacher strolls...

motherhood
mother figure
body
contemporary art
gender

Arts

What is the problem with solutions? Blind or deaf? Which faith? What knowledge? Duchamp or Warhol? East or west? OPEN
ACCESS

To lay a hand on the shoulder of future victims…

Donatien Grau, Pierre Guyotat

»By using voices I have rediscovered what we call humanity.« OPEN
ACCESS

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
ACCESS

Eric Baudelaire

We cannot assume that all government/terrorist interactions will take the form of a two-person zero-sum game. OPEN
ACCESS

Arts

Simon Critchley

Punk’s raptures are mystical.

Iggy showed the error of human existence, the breathless nearness of death, and the lure of fun and action. He was like a much better-looking version of Schopenhauer.

ABO

Arts

»Self-censorship is the worst.«

»Three hundred people left The House that Jack Built. I think that’s very good, and it wasn’t Cannes.«

ABO DE

film
contemporary art
film d'auteur
Evil
cinema

Authors

Books

Georges Didi-Huberman, Laurent Mannoni, ...: Movements of Air

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Watchfiends and Rack Screams

Mathilde Arnoux (ed.), Maria Bremer (ed.): Westkunst, 1981

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): A Sinister Assassin

Sara Alonso Gómez (ed.), Isabel J. Piniella Grillet (ed.), ...: NO Rhetoric(s)

Fiction

To end GOD’S JUDGEMENT

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

Radio Works: 1946–48

Everything must be arranged to a hair in a fulminating order.

Artaud’s work is performative in the sense that it never simply describes, but actively produces the events it enacts. As Austin characterises performative language, ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action’.3 Artaud’s work, performed correctly, is magical, finding its power in ritualistic chanting. Intonation is key to this, recalling what he wrote about metaphysical language in The Theatre and its Double, where the aim is ‘to deal with intonations in an absolutely concrete manner, restoring their...

radio
literature

Fiction

Stephen Barber

Twenty-four hours in state of unconsciousness

Now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself… ABO

Mike Wilson

Mike Wilson’s literature is a fast trip through the American night, drawn in melancholy images of great beauty. ABO

“Poetry must be made by all. Not by one.”

Mário Gomes

“Nuestro Norte es el Sur” = “Our North is the South.” OPEN
ACCESS DE

The limp, voluptuous decadence of the place

Bruce Bégout

I’m not going to talk about my profession here. ABO FR DE

Fiction

Pierre Guyotat

The matrix for »Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats«

“This text was written at the end of 1962, after my return from Algeria. For me the text is the matrix for Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats.” P.G.

OPEN
ACCESS

war experience
war

Fiction

Dodie Bellamy

All that pent up terror and rage

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats.

OPEN
ACCESS

Authors

Books

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Artaud 1937 Apocalypse

Discourse

Digital disrupture

Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

The machine remains alien to any mechanical limitation.

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result...

OPEN
ACCESS DE

Discourse

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
ACCESS

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not the age for facts. OPEN
ACCESS DE

A coffin to bury the statues of the ancestors

Clémentine Deliss

I was initially slightly sceptical of the ramifications and undertones of Renzo Martens’ project in central Congo… OPEN
ACCESS

Sina Dell’Anno

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
ACCESS DE

Discourse

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands.

OPEN
ACCESS DE

Africa
feminism
ritual
ceremony
performance
spiritism
body
colonialism

Discourse

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

Sex creates love and love creates sex

“I don’t believe in progress, no.”

OPEN
ACCESS

philology
music

Authors

Books

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Antoine d’Agata: Diagonale du vide

Alexander Kluge, Joseph Vogl: Soll und Haben

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...: On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

Humanities

"Curriculum Vitae in Pictures“

Maria Zinfert (ed.)

Kracauer. Photographic Archive

The book tells the story of Lili and Siegfried Kracauer’s close working relationship – from the early 1930s following their marriage in Germany, to exile in Paris and the war and post-war years in the USA.

Kracauer. Photographic Archive presents largely unknown material from the estate of the German-American theorist of film and photography, Siegfried Kracauer and his wife and assistant Elisabeth, known as Lili. The single and group portraits, still lifes, street scenes and landscapes collected in this book all come from the estate of Siegfried Kracauer. Published here for the first time, they are an extensive and representative selection from the enlargements, contact sheets and rolls of film originally archived by Lili Kracauer. With...

biography
20th century
1950s
archive
1930s

Humanities

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Felix Stalder

Subjectivation and Authenticity

It is human selection that turns a machine selection that is meaningless because of its compilation criteria into a (potentially) meaningful narrative. ABO DE

Sandra Frimmel

What does it mean? ABO DE

Ines Kleesattel

Thérèse ayant douleurs menstruelles could be a beginning. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Humanities

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them…

“So many egoists call themselves artists,” Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny on May 15, 1871. Even though that is not always obvious, ‘I’, the first person, is the most unknown person, a mystery that is constantly moving towards the other two, the second and third persons, a series of unfoldings and smatterings that eventually gelled as ‘Je est un autre’. That is why ‘apocryphal’ is a literarily irrelevant concept and ‘pseudo’ a symptom, the very proof that life, writing, is made up of echoes, which means that intrusions and thefts (Borges also discusses them) will always be the daily bread of those who write.

Words from others, words taken out of place and mutilated: here are the alms of time, that squanderer’s sole kindness. And so many others, mostly others who wrote, and many other pages, all of them apocryphal, all of them echoes, reflections. All this flows together into—two centuries...

OPEN
ACCESS DE

Humanities