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Arts

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

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

contemporary art
poetry
mother figure
motherhood
body
gender

Fiction

Versuchsanordnung, Ausradierung oder Palimpsest

Als Tempus wählen Sie bitte das Präsens.

Discourse

Haifa’s architectural modernism

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

memory
Middle East
history of architecture
Israel

Humanities

Mario Schulze (ed.), Sarine Waltenspül (ed.)

A non-Western way of thinking

Stretched between eight fingers and two thumbs

cultural history
ethnology
theory of science
history of technology
theory construction
game / play

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

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

New releases

Maaza Mengiste: Of Interest to the General Public

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

THINK ART? THINK ART!

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”

Monograph

One plus one equals other

For an aesthetic mode of thought beyond the “linguistic turn”

Dieter Mersch

Epistemologies of Aesthetics

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

“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”

»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.«

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film d'auteur
Evil
cinema
film
contemporary art

Current Texts

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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Current Texts

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

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

Kim Gordon

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
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Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them… OPEN
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Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

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

Arts

“Every human body is an old civilization”

Susanne Witzgall

“Every human body is an old civilization”

Do migrants develop more restless, mobile identities in general? Is language particularly essential with regard to finding identity?

Susanne Witzgall: One common point in your texts in that both of you describe migration as an incomplete process, as a practice that is not completed with the arrival at the destination, but perhaps even only finds its starting point, its beginning, there. For instance, you Christian Kravagna, have written in your essay that many migrants develop a practice of travelling back and forth, almost like commuting, a process in which there is no definitive home that one can return...

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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

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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“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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Arts

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

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

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

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.

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Authors

Books

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

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira: Invented Skins

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

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...

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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

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

Johannes Binotto

Where words are uttered, the taming is shrewed. 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

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

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

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...

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Discourse

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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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

Michele Pedrazzi

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

The rebellion of the signifiers against their semantic taming OPEN
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Discourse

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

Sex creates love and love creates sex

“I don’t believe in progress, no.”

OPEN
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philology
music

Discourse

From xenolinguistics to cephalopods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

OPEN
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semiotics and semiology
communication
science fiction
communication media
utopia
linguistics

Authors

Books

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

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

Alexander Kluge, Joseph Vogl: Soll und Haben

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

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

Humanities

Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti

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

The Cube and the Face

Does this buried or lost face have a name?

The Cube, as we can see, isn’t one. It is an irregular polyhedron which catalogues describe as having twelve sides — that nice figure, twelve, a destinal figure if ever there was one, which willfully evokes Mallarmé’s throw of the dice, at the very moment that the clock strikes twelve at midnight, in the dark house of Igitur. One can imagine that Giacometti wanted to give a unique volume to the twelve facets — six and six — of two cubes added together: a unique architecture...

face
abstract art
art history
Alberto Giacometti
art theory

Humanities

Alexander García Düttmann

Can contemporary theatre recognize itself in the boxing ring so that its fist, the fist of the past, strikes a forceful and violent blow? ABO DE

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

Sandra Frimmel

What does it mean? ABO 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
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Humanities

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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

OPEN
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artistic practice
realism
transhumanism
art theory
re-enactment
postmodernism

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...

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