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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?

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

Fiction

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

Born too late to see the war, too soon to forget it. Rocked by events which I didn’t experience.

youth
1968
memory
National Socialism
autobiography
identity
post-war period
migration
post-war generation
emigration
trauma
childhood
past
primal scene
homosexuality

Discourse

Cultural Reconstructions of the War Body

to reinstate the body’s historical and political dimension

war experience
death
Poland
war
First World War
performativity

Humanities

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

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

Postcolonial Studies
queer theory
contemporary art
orientalism
contemporary art
desire

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

Magazine Online

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diaphanes_net

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

THINK ART? THINK ART!

Article

I’m not really sure what is and what isn’t theory.

Elisabeth Bronfen Tom, our idea here was that you would give us a little insight into how you find your themes, how you use theory for your texts. T.MC. I’m not really sure what is and what isn’t theory. I don’t really know where theory stops and fiction begins. If you take someone... ABO

Tom McCarthy

“Something that is not nothing”

Monograph

One plus one equals other

For an aesthetic mode of thought beyond the “linguistic turn”

Dieter Mersch

Epistemologies of Aesthetics

Monograph

“Obsessed with buffering”

In this essay, based on a talk he gave in Zurich, award-winning British novelist Tom McCarthy ("Remainder", "C", "Satin Island")... ABO

Tom McCarthy

Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer

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”

Il testo ignoto è una promessa

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza?

OPEN
ACCESS DE FR

reading
music
media theory
electronic music
time

Current Texts

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

Current Texts

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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Slavs and Tatars

To what extent can a revolution of the inner world impact the external, material world surrounding us? OPEN
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Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

The key to survival will lay in female hands. 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

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
motherhood
contemporary art
mother figure
gender

Arts

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

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

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

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

Arts

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

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

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

Arts

»Self-censorship is the worst.«

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

ABO DE

film d'auteur
Evil
film
cinema
contemporary art

Authors

Books

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

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): The Human Face and Other Writings on His Drawings

Liliana Gómez (ed.): Performing Human Rights

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Watchfiends and Rack Screams

Fiction

All that pent up terror and rage

Dodie Bellamy

Plague Widow

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats.

Driving to the Castro, Bee Reaved feels hyper emotional, as she often does in the car, Nick Cave’s Ghosteen on repeat, and she thinks—this is what it’s like to live without hope. Six months after Kevin’s death, friends left her to fare for herself. Other widows warned her this would happen, that everybody would disappear before she was ready. One widow she no longer talks to said, “Wait and see, you’re going to have a total breakdown.” Now, with the...

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Fiction

Pierre Guyotat

“This text was written at the end of 1962, after my return from Algeria. For me the text is the matrix for Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats.” P.G. OPEN
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Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

Like no other journal, Tel Quel was an outstanding arena of literary innovation and intellectual revolution. In this conversation its founder and publisher, Philippe Sollers, provides intimate insight and polemical hindsight into some of the most important milestones of its still-resonating era. ABO DE

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

“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

A. L. Kennedy

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

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

ABO DE FR

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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Authors

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...

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Discourse

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? 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
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Ute Holl

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.” OPEN
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Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

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

Discourse

Sina Dell’Anno

The Disobedience of the Word

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

OPEN
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Discourse

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

On Gestational Communism

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

ABO DE

communism
critique of neoliberalism
community
social movements
family
motherhood
birth

Authors

Books

Alexander Kluge, Joseph Vogl: Soll und Haben

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

Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

Humanities

Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti

Georges Didi-Huberman, Mira Fliescher (ed.), ...

The Cube and the Face

Does this buried or lost face have a name?

The Cube, as we can see, isn’t one. It is an irregular polyhedron which catalogues describe as having twelve sides — that nice figure, twelve, a destinal figure if ever there was one, which willfully evokes Mallarmé’s throw of the dice, at the very moment that the clock strikes twelve at midnight, in the dark house of Igitur. One can imagine that Giacometti wanted to give a unique volume to the twelve facets — six and six — of two cubes added together: a unique architecture...

art history
abstract art
Alberto Giacometti
art theory
face

Humanities

Barbara Basting

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s closeness to fascism has put him in a dubious light. Barbara Basting tells of her personal fascination with futurism and her dehabituation from its aura and central figure. ABO DE

Jean-Luc Nancy

غریبه‌ها غریبه‌ها

ازخودبیگانه‌ ها راه‌ گم‌کرده‌ ها از کدامین اصل نامرئی؟ OPEN
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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

Marcus Quent

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

Is it possible to regain a lost belief? Is it possible to do as we will with belief? OPEN
ACCESS DE

Humanities

A.K. Kaiza

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

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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Humanities

Felix Stalder

Subjectivation and Authenticity

It is human selection that turns a machine selection that is meaningless because of its compilation criteria into a (potentially) meaningful narrative.

ABO DE

Authors