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Why this past? Why is this past mine? A past which I did not even know?

  • post-war generation
  • homosexuality
  • emigration
  • trauma
  • autobiography
  • youth
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  • post-war period
  • memory
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Current Texts

Ute Holl

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

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  • communism
  • monotheism
  • Karl Marx
  • exile
  • film
Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies
Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

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...
  • gender
  • body
  • mother figure
  • motherhood
  • contemporary art
Of what can I be truly certain?
Of what can I be truly certain?

Jean Paul Mongin, François Schwoebel

Mister Descartes and his Evil Genius

Can one trust his senses when perceiving the outside world? When my sensations are the basis of my perception of my own existence, what if these sensations are to be doubted – what can the proof of my own existence be? These questions, both simple and profoundly undermining, stand at the beginning of Modernity: the philosophy of René Descartes. This book drags its readers – and musketeer-like Mister Descartes himself – into the adventure of thinking. It gives a lively...
  • epistemology
  • young readers
  • Descartes
  • certainty
  • thinking
Digital disrupture
Digital disrupture

Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

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...
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Discourse

Stephen Barber

An immodest proposal

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. As Ballard emphasises several times in the World Versus America notebooks, he is utterly serious in his concerns and visions.
Although the Ballard ­estate declined permission for any images of pages from the World Versus America archival notebooks to accompany this essay, any member of the general public interested to do so can readily visit the British Library and view the notebooks in their entirety in the freely-­accessible manuscripts collection there.

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Haifa’s architectural modernism
Haifa’s architectural modernism

Ines Weizman

The Architectural Casino

The Bat Galim Casino marks the point of connection for stories whose threads run along intercontinental channels to the French-American performer Joséphine Baker, while another narrative thread follows the hearing-impaired Viennese architect Adolf Loos and some of his clients, who emigrated to Haifa, highlighting the story of how home-sick migrants aimed to recreate a piece of Europe in Palestine. Weizmans encounter with architect and filmmaker Amos Gitai leads to a deeper investigation of the story of his father, Munio Weinraub,...
  • memory
  • history of architecture
  • Israel
  • Middle East

 

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