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Arts

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

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

body
poetry
motherhood
gender
contemporary art
mother figure

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?

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

Discourse

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

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

Humanities

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

The Power of Narratives in Propaganda

Narratives are the enduring stars of propaganda and disinformation.

intelligence sercive
analytics of power
Russia
propaganda

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

Magazine Online

News + Events

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

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Art, Magazine, Books

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New releases

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

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (ed.): Deberlinization

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (ed.): Deberlinisierung

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

The Subject of Capitalism

Article

The endless array of merchandise

In contemporary capitalism, subjectivity is the product of a mass industry organized on a global level. For Félix Guattari this is actually the first and most important of capitalist productions, because it preconditions and is part of production in all other forms of merchandise. Subjectivity is a ‘key merchandise,’ which... ABO

Maurizio Lazzarato

The Production of Subjectivity

Article

Multiples, Authorship and the Eighteenth-Century Portrait Bust’s Aura

Using the example of the portrait bust as a genre, this paper will explore the ambiguous and problematic relationship between aura and the multiple in the eighteenth century. During this period the portrait bust emerged as an ambitious mode of representation, assuming close attention on the part of the viewer...

Malcolm C. Baker

Multiples, Authorship and the Eighteenth-Century Portrait Bust’s Aura

Article

Con Artist Don Draper, the archetypical American hero

At the very moment when the black figure falls through the vintage snap shots the loss of world seems complete.

Elisabeth Bronfen

The American Dream—A Game of Confidence

Article

We need more planetary dimensions!

My life-long engagement in the project of nomadic subjectivity rests on a specific cartography of our globalised times, marked by large-scale and technologically-mediated transformations of our social, economic and political universes. I start from the assumption that, as a result of these upheavals, traditional forms of self-representation, familiar cultural points... OPEN
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Rosi Braidotti

Nomadic Subjects

To lay a hand on the shoulder of future victims…

»By using voices I have rediscovered what we call humanity.«

OPEN
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Current Texts

From xenolinguistics to cephalopods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

OPEN
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linguistics
communication media
utopia
science fiction
semiotics and semiology
communication

Current Texts

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

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

“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
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Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

New releases

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

Muriel Fischer (ed.), Sandra Frimmel (ed.), ...: Global Narratives of Russian Disinformation

Sigrid Adorf (ed.), Sønke Gau (ed.), ...: going public.

Naomi Boyce (ed.), Matthias Grotkopp (ed.), ...: Digital Interventions

Beate Söntgen (ed.), Katharina Tchelidze (ed.), ...: Scenes of the Avant-Garde

Arts

The future has never looked older

Ergonomic Futures

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

Nothing under the sun, no matter how unbelievable or fantastic, is immune to the pressures of evolution. Take science-fiction. The Force, the mind meld—the entire field of psionics, for that matter—have the look of yellowing comic books, the taste of stale popcorn. They would have gone the way of the dodo, if not for the magic of capital. Hollywood has proved to be more powerful than natural selection, building menageries in the form of franchises, gilding cages for endangered ideas....

ABO

Arts

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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Artur Zmijewski

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
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What is the problem with solutions? Blind or deaf? Which faith? What knowledge? Duchamp or Warhol? East or west? 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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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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sculpture
contemporary art
museum
colonialism
Africa
colonial history

Arts

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
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Authors

Books

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira: Invented Skins

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

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

Alex Arteaga (ed.): Architectures of Embodiment

Liliana Gómez (ed.): Performing Human Rights

Sabine Gebhardt Fink (ed.), Andrej Mircev (ed.): Revolving Documents—Narrations of Beginnings, Recent Methods and Cross-Mappings of Performance Art

Fiction

Let’s find the stage of human affairs

Marion Muller-Colard, Clémence Pollet

Hannah Arendt's Little Theater

“A story worth telling is a story with spectators to judge it.”

While about to finish her last book, the philosopher Hannah Arendt is disturbed by her stubborn alter ego, 9-year-old Little Hannah. Reluctantly, the old woman lets herself drag out onto the streets of New York and into constant conversation by the inquisitive little girl. They enter a little theatre, and together they watch mankind, society, politics, power evolve – and they also experience the role of Evil (in the person of a wolf and of numerous wooden puppets) and its...

Evil
thinking
young readers
ethics
acting

Fiction

Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
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Dodie Bellamy

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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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

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

Fiction

Kim Gordon

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

OPEN
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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

Books

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

Yan Marchand, Vincent Sorel: Diogenes the Dog-Man

Frédéric Morlot, Anne-Margot Ramstein: Albert Einstein's Bright Ideas

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Photographic Archive

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
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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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Michael Heitz, Hendrik Rohlf

Like no other actor, Uma Thurman bears a face as a trace of itself. The most recent emanation of this apparently indestructible construct, so successfully created for Kill Bill, can be seen in the latest film by Lars von Trier. OPEN
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The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

Donatien Grau

Philology keeps it possible to open a space for the minority. 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

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

Hurrah!

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

ABO

Authors

Books

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

Erich Hörl (ed.), Nelly Y. Pinkrah (ed.), ...: Critique and the Digital

Liliana Gómez (ed.), Fabienne Liptay (ed.): Eco-operations

Gertrud Koch: Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even

Humanities

Il testo ignoto è una promessa

Michele Pedrazzi

The Next Bit. Corpo a corpo con l’ignoto

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

Immaginiamo di trovarci al cospetto di un “oggetto semiotico” ignoto. Potrebbe trattarsi di un dipinto, di un brano di letteratura, di un pezzo musicale, di un programma informatico, di un artefatto culturale in senso lato: poco importa al momento, ciò che ci interessa è il carattere di estraneità di questo oggetto, di cui ignoriamo al momento tutto. Attardiamoci per un attimo in questo limbo interpretativo. Nella realtà, questa sorta di tabula rasa sostanzialmente non esiste, ogni oggetto ci arriva già...

OPEN
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electronic music
music
time
reading
media theory

Humanities

Zoran Terzić

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the post-avant-garde era we’re all either in the vanguard or asleep in the lap of capital. In this sense everybody is avant-garde—or nobody. OPEN
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Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. OPEN
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Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem looks back and ahead in the light of the spectacle of aesthetic capitalism, which has become even more unfettered since Debord’s death. ABO FR DE

Jean-Luc Nancy

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

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

Humanities

Mengia Tschalaer

The sexual asylum story

“The sexual asylum story is everything,”

Successful asylum claims generally require generating a racialist, colonialist discourse that impugns the nation-state from which the asylum seeker comes. While to impugn the asylum seeker’s place of origin may well be a necessity for the purpose of asylum, it is problematic if it serves to confirm the moral and political superiority of the West through the myth of the ideal victim. In order to avoid the cookie-cutter victimhood framework that refers to idealizations around “Us” and “Them,” Europe must adopt a reflexive approach to queer asylum that allows for recognizing its own stereotypes in regard to homosexuality, race, and gender, so as not to reproduce colonial and imperialistic narratives of vulnerability, sex, and desire through Eurocentric asylum regimes.

OPEN
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queer theory
migration
performativity
gender
identity

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