User account

Other Topics
Current Texts

Diane Williams

How about some string?

I said “Would you like a rope? You know that haul you have is not secured properly.”
“No,” he said, “but I see you have string!”
“If this comes into motion—” I said, “you should use a rope.”
“Any poison ivy on that? ” he asked me, and I told him my rope had been in the barn peacefully for years.
He took a length of it to the bedside table. He had no concept for what wood could endure.
“Table must have broken when I lashed it onto the truck,” he said.
And, when he was moving the sewing machine, he let the cast iron wheels—bang, bang on the stair.
I had settled down to pack up the flamingo cookie jar, the cutlery, and the cookware, but stopped briefly, for how many times do you catch sudden sight of something heartfelt?
I saw our milk cows in their slow...

ABO DE
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...
  • mother figure
  • body
  • gender
  • motherhood
  • contemporary art
Artaud’s Last Unpublished Work
Artaud’s Last Unpublished Work

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

Watchfiends and Rack Screams

I had a dream last night, scrambled, yes indeed, for a scrambled dream it sure was scrambled. But so meaningful on the other hand, so meaningful. Jean Dequeker was dragging himself along the earth with short and truncated legs, and he said: Am I a beast, a pebble, a branch or a meat stall? But after all what is a tree? What is a tree? Madame Dequeker was behind a cage with her stomach pressed against the flange of this...
  • Modernism
  • literature
  • avant-garde
  • autobiography
  • poetry
Fiction

Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

Externalized memory had always proceeded by contractions, summaries, reductions, selections, breaks in flow, as well as by organization, classification, boiling down. Card catalogues reduced thousands of works to a few key notions; tables of contents contracted the hundreds of pages in a given book. The sign itself was the first abbreviation of experience. An epic stitched of words was an abbreviation of the war, the long years of which were reduced to a few nights of recitation; the written text that recorded the epic was a contraction of the oral narration which pushed aside its sensory richness, melody, life in a thousand details. In accumulating, every level of abbreviation reconstituted an infinite flow, a new dilation that would be contracted in its turn. From the plurality of pages to the index and the table of contents; from the plurality of books to card catalogues.

The abbreviated elements were further arranged, situated...

OPEN
ACCESS
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...
OPEN
ACCESS
DE
Discourse
About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

OPEN
ACCESS
DE
  • National Socialism
  • gift
  • political aesthetics
  • contemporary art
  • ethics
  • concentration camp
  • propaganda
  • migration
  • Poland
  • documenta
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,...
  • Middle East
  • history of architecture
  • memory
  • Israel
Humanities

Zoran Terzić

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the late nineteenth century Alfred Jarry created a prototype of the modern wannabe in his pot-bellied Père Ubu, a figure that raises entitlement to a high art. Ubu doesn’t want to be king; others urge him to it. But he is also the others. And when he does become king, CEO, or US president, he doesn’t know what it means, or if it means anything at all. He just states his claim. And so he shimmies from statement to power. And having obtained power, Ubu decerebrates the world, exposing the grounds for groundlessness, to paraphrase Ortega y Gasset. Ubu is a tautomaniac, that is, he can be explained in his own terms and is thus always in the right (being in the right is all he is). He needs no proof, but on the contrary wants “to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought” (Deleuze & Guattari)....

OPEN
ACCESS
DE

 

We like !