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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?

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

Fiction

Jean Paul Mongin, François Schwoebel

Of what can I be truly certain?

dream
Descartes
epistemology
subjectivity
religion
certainty
doubt
young readers
mind-body problem
thinking

Discourse

Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...

The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization

Today, it has become a truism that capital circulates, that data, populations and materials flow, that money offers liquidity.

ecology
art
economics
digital media
capitalism
cultural critic
digital culture
material flow

Humanities

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

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

desire
orientalism
queer theory
Postcolonial Studies
contemporary art
contemporary art

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.

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

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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

Observing the Spectator

Article

The Relentlessness of Perspective. A Look at the Bystanders in 15th-Century Italian Painting

In the center of this article stands Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ. The enigmatic painting has been the object of innumerable interpretations; while for the most part, research has focused on the identification of the three prominent figures in the foreground, this article suggests that it is not the...

Urte Krass

Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit

Article

Public Relations

Within a group of manuscripts, made in the circle around Jeanne II of Navarre in the 1330's (BnF, Ms. fr. 5716; BnF, Ms. n. a. lat. 3145; Ms. fr. 13568), several miniatures show distinguished figures that not only appear as witnesses inside the pictured scene but also serve as links...

Anja Rathmann-Lutz

Public Relations

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 Invented Beholder: Allegorical Powers of Persuasion as Visual Strategy

It is not just the painting that needs a beholder. The allegorical literature at the end of the Middle Ages is addressed to listeners as well as to spectators: the elaborated tableaux developed at the mind’s eye implicitly address a large audience. The prototypic description of paintings on the gardenwalls...

Cornelia Logemann

The Invented Audience

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

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Current Texts

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

Current Texts

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

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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Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

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

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
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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...

contemporary art
mother figure
motherhood
gender
body

Arts

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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Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

To lay a hand on the shoulder of future victims…

Donatien Grau, Pierre Guyotat

»By using voices I have rediscovered what we call humanity.« OPEN
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

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

Simon Critchley

Punk’s raptures are mystical.

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

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

Authors

Books

Donatien Grau (ed.), Christoph Wiesner (ed.): After the Crisis

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira: Invented Skins

Shusha Niederberger (ed.), Cornelia Sollfrank (ed.), ...: Aesthetics of the Commons

Wolfgang Brückle (ed.), Fred Truniger (ed.): Display, Distribute, Disrupt

Kieran Aarons (ed.), Reiner Schürmann, ...: The Place of the Symbolic

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

Fiction

“Obsessed with buffering”

Tom McCarthy

Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer

Towards the end of Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the stumbling ingénue of a hero Tyrone Slothrop sets off on a commando raid. The territory he and his cohorts move through is a giant metropolis, a “factory-state” in which capital, technology and power, perfectly co-calibrated, send airships drifting through urban canyons, past chrome caryatids and roof-gardens on skyscrapers that themselves shoot up and down on elevator-cables: a conurbation Pynchon calls the “City of the Future” or “Raketen-Stadt.” The...

ABO

fiction
Modernism
literature
literary studies
conversation

Fiction

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

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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Mike Wilson

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

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

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

Sina Dell’Anno

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

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

Discourse

From xenolinguistics to cephalopods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

OPEN
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utopia
semiotics and semiology
communication media
communication
science fiction
linguistics

Discourse

Michele Pedrazzi

Il testo ignoto è una promessa

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

OPEN
ACCESS DE FR

reading
music
electronic music
time
media theory

Authors

Books

Elisabeth Bronfen: Mad Men, Death and the American Dream

David Graeber: Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking

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

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Fotoarchiv

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

Humanities

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

An Annotated History of Wakanda

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.

The movie Black Panther, which has become the most successful superhero movie of all time, imagines Wakanda in a very specific and maybe even slightly emancipatory way. Black Panther, now the king of the concealed super-state, faces his current archenemy Killmonger, who wants to distribute arms to the Global South for an uprising against neoliberal imperialism. The scene that introduces Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, the antagonist to Ryan Coogler’s newly imagined hero, takes place in a museum. Killmonger (played by a mesmeric...

OPEN
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Humanities

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

Sina Dell’Anno

The rebellion of the signifiers against their semantic taming OPEN
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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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Humanities

Nothing is at home

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

ABO

aesthetics
art
phenomenology
art theory
Modernism

Humanities

Zoran Terzić

Critique of generic rationality

The programs “sense” how the clients function, but not because AI is becoming more human—rather because clients now function as generically as programs.

OPEN
ACCESS DE