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From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

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  • communication
  • communication media
  • linguistics
  • science fiction
  • semiotics and semiology
  • utopia
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...
  • body
  • mother figure
  • contemporary art
  • gender
  • motherhood
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...
  • Descartes
  • epistemology
  • thinking
  • certainty
  • young readers
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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Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.
Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Junk Philology. An Anti-Commentary

whole blocks of avenues in all directions | The verse snaps tight around the dynamic contrast of geometric uniformity and omni-directional spread, with north-south avenue grids stretched across the crest of human sound. From solid blocks to liquid (“we got a drink”) to gas “(As if the fog lifted”): the metamorphosis of phase-states. But when I read BLOCKS, I hear Lil Wayne: “tha block is hot, tha block is hot… Dodging cops and burning blocks.” And I remember the boys...
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