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.

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

Discourse

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

Hurrah!

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

Humanities

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

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

desire
contemporary art
queer theory
Postcolonial Studies
contemporary art
orientalism

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.

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

Magazine Online

News + Events

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

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

Autofiction—Metafiction

Article

“Obsessed with buffering”

I’ve become obsessed with buffering—or the narrator in my new novel is obsessed with buffering. He’s an anthropologist who has grown up reading Lévi-Strauss but he’s also a corporate anthropologist who is working for the Man. He’s putting culture in the service of capital. Like we all do, he spends... ABO

Tom McCarthy

“Obsessed with buffering”

Monograph

Born too late to see the war, too soon to forget it.

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

Reiner Schürmann

Origins

Monograph

Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Das Fotobuch »Kracauer. Fotoarchiv« zeigt bisher unbekannte fotografische Materialien aus dem Nachlass des Soziologen, Feuilletonisten und Filmtheoretikers Siegfried Kracauer: Portraits,...

Maria Zinfert (ed.)

Kracauer. Fotoarchiv

Monograph

»Ich bin nicht gut im Vergessen. Ich kann es überhaupt nicht«

Ein junger Deutscher in den sechziger Jahren schreibt hier, heimgesucht von einer übergroßen Sensibilität für die Allgegenwart der Vergangenheit. Geradezu körperlich trägt er in seiner eigenen Person die Unfähigkeit aus, zu vergessen, was er selbst nicht bewusst erlebt hat: Krieg und Vernichtung. Die stark autobiographisch geprägte Erzählung folgt den zahlreichen...

Reiner Schürmann

Ursprünge

Ute Holl

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.”

OPEN
ACCESS

film
monotheism
Karl Marx
communism
exile

Current Texts

Soham Gupta

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.

ABO DE FR

Current Texts

Kim Gordon

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
ACCESS

Diane Williams

How about some string?

I said “Would you like a rope? You know that haul you have is not secured properly.” ABO DE

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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Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

body
gender
motherhood
contemporary art
mother figure

Arts

Michele Pedrazzi

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

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

“I don’t believe in progress, no.” OPEN
ACCESS

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
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Arts

»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
performance art
identity
human–animal communication

Arts

Tyler Coburn

The future has never looked older

However convincingly space agencies justify the enormous budgets, there’s one gratuitous expense: training astronauts for free fall.

ABO

Books

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

Alex Arteaga (ed.): Architectures of Embodiment

Georges Didi-Huberman, Mira Fliescher (ed.), ...: The Cube and the Face

Jens Andermann (ed.), Lisa Blackmore (ed.), ...: Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape

Fiction

"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...

archive
biography
1930s
1950s
20th century

Fiction

Mike Wilson

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

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

Johannes Binotto

Where words are uttered, the taming is shrewed. OPEN
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Julien Maret

Track the clouds

heal slowly… when the deed is done… when coming back is nowhere… we slide our hands through sloping fountains… ABO

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.

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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…

Now the dead will no longer be buried, now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself, now human bodies will expectorate fury and envision their own transformation or negation, now infinite and untold catastrophes are imminently on their way —ready to cross the bridge over the river Aire and engulf us all — in this winter of discontent, just beginning at this dead-of-night instant before midnight, North-Sea ice-particles already crackling in the air and the last summer long-over, the final moment of my seventeenth birthday, so we have to go, the devil is at our heels… And now we’re running at full-tilt through the centre of the city, across the square beneath the Purbeck-marble edifice of the Queen’s Hotel, down towards the dark arches under the railway tracks, the illuminated sky shaking, the air fissured with beating cacophony,...

ABO

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

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

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

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

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

Zoran Terzić

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the post-avant-garde era we’re all either in the vanguard or asleep in the lap of capital. In this sense everybody is avant-garde—or nobody. OPEN
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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?

OPEN
ACCESS DE

Discourse

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

On Gestational Communism

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

ABO DE

community
motherhood
communism
social movements
birth
family
critique of neoliberalism

Authors

Books

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

David Graeber: Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking

Humanities

The Disobedience of the Word

Sina Dell’Anno

Punk / Philology

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

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime,’ so well had he read his Homer.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg paints the portrait of a philologist who has lost touch with the world through reading the classics too closely. The comedy of the aphorism lies not in just the misreading alone, but in the fact that the philologist exchanges the everyday ‘prime’ for the much more exotic name of the Trojan king; as if the textual-critical maxim lectio difficilior had gone over into...

OPEN
ACCESS DE

Humanities