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Arts

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

This issue explores practices of human and non-human substitution.

gender
motherhood
contemporary art
mother figure
body
poetry

Fiction

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?

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

Discourse

Haifa’s architectural modernism

Ines Weizman synchronises different narratives that have been swept away by the chaotic hurricanes of time.

Middle East
memory
Israel
history of architecture

Humanities

Liliana Gómez (ed.), Fabienne Liptay (ed.)

Between global and local ecologies

Eco-operations addresses these emerging aesthetic ecologies and new technologies of cooperation that both challenge and shape a sustainable future

global ecology
artistic practice
ecology

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

Magazine Online

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

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New releases

Karin Gludovatz, Matthias Warstat, ...: Intervenierende Künste

Eva Backhaus (ed.), Grit Dommes (ed.), ...: Dynamics of the Intransitive

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback (ed.), David Payne (ed.): Breaking Grounds

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: In Touch: Encounters between Art and Research

Autofiction—Metafiction

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

Article

“I fled Europe as one flees one’s parents’ house“

I recognize that lobby. The Washington Hilton. Men in business suits are crammed in there by the thousands. American philosophers meeting for a convention. A compact assembly of thinkers. Thirty-five hundred of them, Newsweek published the figure. The eastern division of the American Philosophical Association. I make a tour of...

Reiner Schürmann

How I Try to Sell Myself to the Americans

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

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”

Nothing is at home

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

ABO

aesthetics
art theory
Modernism
art
phenomenology

Current Texts

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

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

OPEN
ACCESS

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… ABO

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? 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

How about some string?

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

Arts

Yes, magic exists!

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

A Sinister Assassin

from myself / to myself / who is it that comes / and who is it that goes?

Antonin Artaud’s very last work, prior to his death in March 1948, is the most extraordinary element of his entire body of work – and is the element now most enduringly inspirational, for contemporary artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, choreographers, and others inspired by Artaud – through its fiercely exploratory, extreme and combative forms, along with its dissolutions and negations of forms, focused above all on the human anatomy, as well as on sonic experimentation and on provocations for innovation in...

literature
avant-garde
poetry
Modernism
autobiography

Arts

Artur Zmijewski

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

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

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
ACCESS

Arts

Clémentine Deliss

A coffin to bury the statues of the ancestors

I was initially slightly sceptical of the ramifications and undertones of Renzo Martens’ project in central Congo…

OPEN
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colonialism
sculpture
contemporary art
Africa
museum
colonial history

Arts

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands.

OPEN
ACCESS DE

body
ceremony
Africa
feminism
spiritism
ritual
performance
colonialism

Authors

Books

Wiktoria Furrer, Carla Gabrí, ...: How to Teach Art?

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

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

Dieter Mersch: Epistemologies of Aesthetics

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

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

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
ACCESS DE

Fiction

Dodie Bellamy

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

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
ACCESS

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

“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

Kim Gordon

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

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

Authors

Books

Tom McCarthy: Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer

Donatien Mary, Ronan de Calan: The Ghost of Karl Marx

Jean Paul Mongin, François Schwoebel: Mister Descartes and his Evil Genius

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

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

Allison Grimaldi Donahue: The History of Breathing

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

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

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

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

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

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

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

Jean-Luc Nancy

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

αποξενωμένοι αποκλίνοντες από ποιο αόρατο οικείο; OPEN
ACCESS FR FA DE

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
ACCESS DE

Discourse

»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

contemporary art
Evil
cinema
film
film d'auteur

Authors

Books

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

Alexander Kluge, Joseph Vogl: Soll und Haben

Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

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

Humanities

The biggest bite out of the fruit of Knowledge

Claus Pias (ed.)

Cybernetics

“To refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking.”

Although aspects of cybernetics can be traced back to various points in history, the proceedings of the so-called Macy Conferences, which have been edited for this volume, represent its modern foundational document. Held between 1946 and 1948 under the cumbersome title “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems,” the papers delivered at these conferences were soon thereafter, at least as of 1949, referred to as contributions to cybernetics. Sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation (which was...

computational sciences
media theory
historic documents
epistemology
computer science

Humanities

Jean-Luc Nancy

غریبه‌ها غریبه‌ها

ازخودبیگانه‌ ها راه‌ گم‌کرده‌ ها از کدامین اصل نامرئی؟ OPEN
ACCESS FR GR DE

Andreas L. Hofbauer

The yoke of being, noteworthy dis-position

Anyone inclined to describe hunters and gatherers as poor, would be advised to understand them as free. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. OPEN
ACCESS 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
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Humanities

Alexander García Düttmann

What does “emancipatory” mean today?

Let us pretend one more time that the world can still be saved.

Pretending one more time that the world can still be saved and asking whether art contains an emancipatory potential can be a meaningful endeavour only if illegitimate attempts at appropriating this emancipatory potential are thwarted. Its usurpation, which amounts to its abolition, must be prevented. Critique that deserves its name must first and foremost struggle against false pretenders, not against those who do not even claim to be pretenders. The efficiency of critique’s propaedeutic character should be sought in this struggle against false pretenders. If one fears that its negativity may entail a dangerous impotence and if for this reason one wishes to supplement it with a justifying and constructive “affirmationism”, mindful of the fact that it was once meant to prepare the outline of a metaphysics purged of precritical dogmatism, then one risks forgetting that critique ceases to hurt and can no longer trigger an impulse the instant that...

ABO DE