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Arts

Duchamp. Messager.

L'urinoir de Duchamp annonce en fait la disparition du système des beaux-arts et l'avènement du système de « l'art en général ». Duchamp n'en est ni l'auteur ni l'agent, mais son brillant messager.

art history
Marcel Duchamp
art theory

Fiction

Writing Femicide in Mud

The story of violence against women constantly disappears even as it is continuously told, re-told. Might a Story Knife play a role in reversing such erasure?

violence
feminism
body
gender
archaeology

Discourse

Anna-Lisa Dieter (ed.), Daniel Tyradellis (ed.)

A dynamic element, rather than a passive object

Water is ubiquitous: we drink it, bathe in it, encounter it as rain, ice, or river. And yet it remains contradictory— both familiar and strange.

society
exhibition
global ecology
Limnology

Humanities

Muriel Fischer (ed.), Sandra Frimmel (ed.), ...

The Power of Narratives in Propaganda

Narratives are the enduring stars of propaganda and disinformation.

propaganda
intelligence sercive
analytics of power
Russia

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
motherhood
feminism
aesthetics
contemporary art
mother figure
father figure
gender

Magazine Online

News + Events

BOOKLAUNCH DEBERLINISIERUNG | DEBERLINIZATION

01.11.2026, 14:00 – 30.11.2026

140 years after the end of the Berlin/Congo Conference (1884–85) The Deberlinization Festschrift reflects on the urgency and potentials of a Deberlinization process.

HKW

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

You are invited to enjoy the ungoing exhibition of artworks, leave through our printed magazine or read up on twenty years of publishing in almost 1000 books.

diaphanes_net

01.11.26 – 14:00 – BOOKLAUNCH DEBERLINISIERUNG | DEBERLINIZATION

The Deberlinization Festschrift, curated by Ibou Coulibaly Diop, Franck Hermann Ekra, and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung reflects on the urgency and potentials of a Deberlinization process.

New releases

Anna-Lisa Dieter (ed.), Daniel Tyradellis (ed.): On Water

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (ed.): Deberlinization

Giuseppe Di Salvatore (ed.), Fabienne Liptay (ed.): The Sirenic: Follow the Water, Follow the Sound

Eliana Hernández-Pachón: Suspended Waters

Cristina Rivera Garza: De-Blading the Knife

Kevin B. Lee (ed.), Marine de Dardel (ed.), ...: The Future of Reality

Choreographing multitudes

Article

Computer Games and the Distraction Economy

Digital culture promises a business model that oscillates between blockbusters and niche products. This model leads to upheavals in the market that directly affect, for instance, the quality and availability of computer games. Just as we rely on cognitive models in our interactions with individuals, our understanding of complex social... ABO

Peter Krapp

Between the Madness and the Wisdom of Crowds

Article

Crowds in augmented space

He must have had a long night. Now, at a quarter past eight in the morning, the young man is standing in front of the mirror with disheveled hair and a crooked tie and preparing himself for another day at the office. Beyond typical bathroom activity, however, this routine also... ABO

Roland Meyer

Augmented Crowds

Article

Zombies, Panic Prevention, Crowd Simulation

Calculating disasters today means to coalesce empirical data of past catastrophies, observational data of mass events, and the computer-based experimentation and scenario-building with virtual ABM models of realistic agents and spatial environments. It thus combines analytical and synthetic approaches, supported by advanced visualization techniques, in the areas of crowd simulation,... ABO

Sebastian Vehlken

After Affects

Article

The Politics and aesthetics of participation

New forms of political participation formulate themselves in the public sphere. They are in most cases performed fully aware of the ambivalence, power and vulnerability of the body: in demonstrations or the occupation of buildings, street crossings or train tracks, in chaining themselves to buildings, suspending themselves from bridges or... ABO

Gabriele Klein

The (Micro)Politics of Social Choreography

An immodest proposal

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 so can readily visit the British Library and view the notebooks in their entirety in the freely-accessible manuscripts collection there.

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Current Texts

Donatien Grau, James Spooner

“Fuck that thing.” That’s all punk needs.

“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.’”

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Current Texts

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

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

Soham Gupta

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

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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Arts

Reality, No More?

Marine de Dardel (ed.), Kevin B. Lee (ed.), ...

The Future of Reality

“Reality is all we have to love. There is nothing else.” John Berger

Everyday life without audiovisual technologies is no longer imaginable. How do we experience reality in the age of generative AI, algorithmic media, and the omnipresence of digital platforms? How does cinema—and all audiovisual media— construct, challenge and reimagine reality in times of ecological, political, and technological transformation?

art
film
contemporary art
sound

Arts

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

What is the problem with solutions? Blind or deaf? Which faith? What knowledge? Duchamp or Warhol? East or west? OPEN
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»Three hundred people left The House that Jack Built. I think that’s very good, and it wasn’t Cannes.« ABO DE

Tyler Coburn

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

Arts

Eric Baudelaire

A for Anomie

We cannot assume that all government/terrorist interactions will take the form of a two-person zero-sum game.

A for Anomie

The idea that terrorism and other forms of political violence are directly related to strains caused by strongly held grievances has been one of the most common explanations to date and can be traced to a diverse set of theoretical concepts including relative deprivation, social disorganization, breakdown, tension, and anomie. Merton (1938) identifies anomie as a cultural condition of frustration, in which values regarding goals and how to achieve them conflict with limitations on the means of achievement.

Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan, “Research on Terrorism and Countering Terrorism”, Crime and Justice, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2009.

B for Block or Blocked

If terrorism in each of its expressions can be considered an indicator of the existence of a political block (of an impossibility of reacting if one wishes to react differently), this influences its real ability to modify the situation. Terrorism has been historically more successful when it was not...

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Arts

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

Sex creates love and love creates sex

“I don’t believe in progress, no.”

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music
philology

Books

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

Jürgen Brokoff (ed.), Karin Gludovatz (ed.), ...: Intervenierende Künste

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

Donatien Grau, Sylvère Lotringer: I Was More American than the Americans

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

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

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

A. L. Kennedy

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

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… ABO

Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
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Raphaëlle Milone

Old-school publisher, avant-garde dandy, undisputed expert on the global history of Dada: Raphaëlle Milone paints an intimate but unsparing portrait of a man who belonged perhaps to a dying breed but is still remembered vividly. ABO FR

Fiction

Kim Gordon

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

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Fiction

Pierre Guyotat

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.

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war
war experience

Authors

Discourse

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
motherhood
gender
body
contemporary art

Discourse

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

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

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

Ines Kleesattel

Thérèse ayant douleurs menstruelles could be a beginning. OPEN
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Discourse

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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Discourse

From xenolinguistics to cephalopods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

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utopia
semiotics and semiology
science fiction
communication
linguistics
communication media

Authors

Books

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Artaud 1937 Apocalypse

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

David Graeber: Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking

Alexander Kluge, Joseph Vogl: Soll und Haben

Humanities

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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Humanities