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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?

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

Fiction

The matrix for »Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats«

“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.

war
war experience

Discourse

Time Probe Zero Synthesis

When to switch off? What to look for? How to write? Which lines to draw? Whence self-recognition? DIAPHANES 3—TIME PROBE ZERO SYNTHESIS

discourse
contemporary culture
contemporary art
contemporary literature
art theory
literature
art

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
orientalism
contemporary art
Postcolonial Studies
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.

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

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

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”

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

Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti

Does this buried or lost face have a name?

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

The Cube and the Face

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

OPEN
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Current Texts

From xenolinguistics to cephalopods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

OPEN
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science fiction
utopia
communication
linguistics
communication media
semiotics and semiology

Current Texts

“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

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… ABO

A. L. Kennedy

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

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

gender
body
mother figure
contemporary art
motherhood

Arts

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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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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Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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Arts

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

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

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

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
contemporary art
film d'auteur
Evil
cinema

Authors

Books

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

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

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

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

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

The limp, voluptuous decadence of the place

Bruce Bégout

I’m not going to talk about my profession here. ABO FR DE

Dietmar Dath

Do you want to believe in language?

The index calculates everything. Announcements of awards, mostly false, light up then die. His dopamine balance feeds the list. Limbic structures support it. Brain means house, should have windows. OPEN
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Axel Dielmann

“Can you imagine something like that?”

The curators were probably worried that someone would stumble carelessly up the stairs while looking at the exhibits… OPEN
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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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Fiction

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

Fiction

I.V. Nuss

Pregnancy is the weirdest condition

The seahorse is the chosen metaphor for pregnant trans men

ABO DE

homosexuality
contemporary literature
motherhood

Authors

Books

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

Marion Muller-Colard, Clémence Pollet: Hannah Arendt's Little Theater

Yann Le Bras, Jean Paul Mongin: The Death of Socrates

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): A Sinister Assassin

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

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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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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Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

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

Marcus Quent

Critical thought that amounts to nothing more than questioning given positions, in negotiating existing conflict between parties, is none. 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
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Discourse

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

Gertrud Koch: Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even

David Graeber: Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking

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

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
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Humanities

Jean-Luc Nancy

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

αποξενωμένοι αποκλίνοντες από ποιο αόρατο οικείο; OPEN
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Ines Kleesattel

Thérèse ayant douleurs menstruelles could be a beginning. OPEN
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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

Zoran Terzić

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
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Humanities

Elena Vogman

Ornamentation is the body of our thought

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

OPEN
ACCESS

Humanities

Sandra Frimmel

Why should this be art?

What does it mean?

I Hate the Avant-Garde. When an artist as self-ironic and self-reflective as Yuri Albert makes such a statement about art, then skepticism is called for. Like his overall series Elitist-Democratic Art, the title deliberately plays with simple affirmations and negations, and at the same time exhibits the inherent receptive dilemma of the series: a (large) part of the artistically trained viewers see these shorthand works as abstract forms, without understanding the text, and only the few who can read (Russian) shorthand perceive a text, which for them doesn’t necessarily have to be art. I Hate the Avant-Garde was created in 2017, after a sketch made in 1987 in reaction to a changed situation in the reception of nonconformist art. With the beginning of perestroika, unofficial art that had hitherto been excluded from the state-run art scene—that is, from the official infrastructure of museums and exhibition spaces, and from art scholarship...

ABO DE