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Arts

The Architecture of Disaster

How can the gap between images become a site of critical counter-reading rather than a symbol of erasure?

war
forensic science
photography
photographic images
History of photography
history of media

Fiction

When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker going slow

In his photographs and texts, Calcutta-based Soham Gupta forces the tension that arises between fiction and real-life conditions in as yet unseen ways.

Discourse

Should we abandon the cosmopolitan idea?

minor cosmopolitan takes the “ism” out of “cosmopolitanism.”

cosmopolitics
politics
globalization
art
art theory

Humanities

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

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

queer theory
contemporary art
desire
orientalism
contemporary art
Postcolonial Studies

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.

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

Magazine Online

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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

The Subject of Capitalism

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

Article

The endless array of merchandise

In contemporary capitalism, subjectivity is the product of a mass industry organized on a global level. For Félix Guattari this is actually the first and most important of capitalist productions, because it preconditions and is part of production in all other forms of merchandise. Subjectivity is a ‘key merchandise,’ which... ABO

Maurizio Lazzarato

The Production of Subjectivity

Article

Counter-Hegemonic Struggle and Agonistic Practices 

In recent years we have witnessed an incredible acceleration in the process of commodification in the field of culture. With the development of the culture industries, the worst nightmares of Horkheimer and Adorno seem to have been realized. Indeed, some theorists claim that, through our dependence on the entertainments corporations,... OPEN
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Chantal Mouffe

Democratic Politics in the Age of Post-Fordism

Monograph

Mad Men, Death and the American Dream

Matthew Weiner’s series Mad Men is more than a resonant time capsule. Elisabeth Bronfen’s claim is that the show not only thrives on a significant double voicing, reviving the literature, film, music and fashion of the past within and for the cultural concerns of the present. With Don Draper an...

Elisabeth Bronfen

Mad Men, Death and the American Dream

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first…

ABO DE FR

Current Texts

»This is not my blood.«

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

OPEN
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Video art
human–animal communication
performance art
identity

Current Texts

Sina Dell’Anno

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
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“Fuck that thing.” That’s all punk needs.

Donatien Grau, James Spooner

“The thing about punk is that you’re allowed to talk about anything. Kids can talk about whatever they want. There’s nobody saying, ‘No, you can’t do that, it’s not punk.’” 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
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Simon Critchley

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

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...

mother figure
body
contemporary art
gender
motherhood

Arts

Michele Pedrazzi

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
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Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

Eric Baudelaire

We cannot assume that all government/terrorist interactions will take the form of a two-person zero-sum game. OPEN
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Ornamentation is the body of our thought

Elena Vogman

With Bely, a continuum is continuously produced between visceral organic states, political states of society and meteorological states of the world. OPEN
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Arts

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands.

OPEN
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body
ceremony
performance
colonialism
feminism
spiritism
Africa
ritual

Arts

Clémentine Deliss

A coffin to bury the statues of the ancestors

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

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museum
colonialism
Africa
sculpture
contemporary art
colonial history

Authors

Books

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Photographic Archive

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

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): “Here Lies” preceded by “The Indian Culture”

Daniel Berndt (ed.), Susanne Huber (ed.), ...: ambivalent work*s

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

Fiction

An immodest proposal

Stephen Barber

A War of Fragments: World Versus America

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...

OPEN
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Fiction

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. OPEN
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Tom McCarthy

The ironic self-awareness of the poet can only be that of his own inauthenticity, repeated or fed back into itself at increasingly conscious levels, and ‘to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic’. ABO DE

Ann Cotten

The last philosopher. The zen-queen.

In what way are you a communist – since we need to define this. OPEN
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“Poetry must be made by all. Not by one.”

Mário Gomes

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

Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember?

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...

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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
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Authors

Books

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Fotoarchiv

Gleb J. Albert (ed.), Nikolaj Evreinov, ...: The Steps of Nemesis

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Radio Works: 1946–48

Marion Muller-Colard, Nathalie Novi: Dr. Freud, Fish Whisperer

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
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Discourse

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

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

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

Ute Holl

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.” OPEN
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Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
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Discourse

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.”

OPEN
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contemporary art
political aesthetics
propaganda
Poland
concentration camp
National Socialism
documenta
ethics
migration
gift

Discourse

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

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

OPEN
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Authors

Books

Marietta Kesting (ed.), Susanne Witzgall (ed.): Human after Man

Philippe Despoix (ed.), Siegfried Kracauer, ...: The Past's Threshold

Gertrud Koch: Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even

Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

Humanities

The Moses complex’s place is exile.

Ute Holl

Introduction

The Moses complex is complex, because its topological space is differentiated as a relationship of ratios, resonances, and interferences.

The unkind and inhuman God of Moses in Exodus reveals himself as a terrifying media agent. This is why the Moses figure insistently returns in the arts and sciences of the twentieth century. It corresponds to the fact that the media initially remain concealed when new laws come in with them. When Moses climbs the mountain, the tablets on which the caesuras of writing will turn out to be there already, while the people are still camping in the desert,...

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Danièle Huillet
Arnold Schönberg
exile
Jean-Marie Straub
community

Humanities

Alexander García Düttmann

Can contemporary theatre recognize itself in the boxing ring so that its fist, the fist of the past, strikes a forceful and violent blow? ABO DE

Sandra Frimmel

What does it mean? ABO DE

Mengia Tschalaer

“The sexual asylum story is everything,” OPEN
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Jean-Luc Nancy

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

αποξενωμένοι αποκλίνοντες από ποιο αόρατο οικείο; OPEN
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Humanities

Nothing is at home

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

ABO

Modernism
phenomenology
aesthetics
art
art theory

Humanities

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem looks back and ahead in the light of the spectacle of aesthetic capitalism, which has become even more unfettered since Debord’s death.

ABO FR DE

Authors