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Stephen Barber . Futurama Nights, October 1978 . . . . . Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov . A Diary of my Encounters . . . . . A swansong. Death in Venice, reenacted . . . . . Ann Cotten . Dialoge . . . . . Alexander García Düttmann . Kann es eine Gesellschaft ohne Feier geben oder Die kritische Frage des Theaters . . . . . Mário Gomes . Poetik der Architektur . . . . . Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau . Über Realismus . . . . . Eric Baudelaire . Abecedarium . . . . . Artur Zmijewski . Conversation on “Glimpse” . . . . . Diane Williams . Bang Bang on the Stair . . . . . Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger . Venice, Lagos, and the Spaces in between . . . . . A Questionnaire: Tom Kummer . . . . . Bruce Bégout . L’homme de Venise . . . . . Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau . On Realism . . . . . Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger . Venedig, Lagos und der Raum dazwischen . . . . . Mário Gomes . The Poetics of Architecture . . . . . Bruce Bégout . Der Mann aus Venedig . . . . . Alexander García Düttmann . Can There Be a Society Without Ceremony or the Critical Question of Theatre . . . . . Ann Cotten . Dialogs . . . . . Artur Zmijewski . Gespräch über ‚Glimpse‘ . . . . . Diane Williams . Rums Bums auf der Treppe . . . . . Bruce Bégout . The Man from Venice
Web Magazine
About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
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Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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A for Anomie

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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DIAPHANES No. 11
DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

Bang Bang Baroque

On the first gaze the works of Emma Waltraud Howes seem incongruously out of time. Visiting her studio, one enters... ABO

Emma Waltraud Howes

Questionnaire Emma Waltraud Howes

Pregnancy is the weirdest condition

The seahorse is the chosen metaphor for pregnant trans men ABO DE

I.V. Nuss

The Love in the Convex, in Absolute Roundness and the Sluttification of All Men West of the Bosporus

On Gestational Communism

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

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

Surrogate Abolition

DIAPHANES No. 10
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 10

I remember

I remember during the frozen Tokyo winter of 1997: I took long walks in the dead of night through the Shinjuku Kabuki-cho district of endless bars, subterranean clubs and abandoned cinemas with Donald Richie, the American writer and film-maker, already in Tokyo for over forty ­years at that moment and...

Johanna Went

I remember (Johanna Went)

The Disobedience of the Word

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

Punk / Philology

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Junk Philology. An Anti-Commentary

Sex creates love and love creates sex

“I don’t believe in progress, no.” OPEN
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Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, Richard Hell

"I’d rather live in a book"

“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... OPEN
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Donatien Grau, James Spooner

Afropunk Philology

DIAPHANES No. 8/9
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 8/9

Subjectivation and Authenticity

It is human selection that turns a machine selection that is meaningless because of its compilation criteria into a (potentially)... ABO DE

Felix Stalder

Feedback as Authenticity

Critique of generic rationality

The programs “sense” how the clients function, but not because AI is becoming more human—rather because clients now function as... OPEN
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Zoran Terzić

The Grand Generalization

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

Becoming the translator rather than the careless exploiter of nature might be the ad­venture of humankind in the years to come. OPEN
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Claire Fontaine

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

The sexual asylum story

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... OPEN
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Mengia Tschalaer

Queer Spaces

Artificial and Other Intelligences

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so many skyscrapers, so many people, so much technology! And such wonderful noodle soups! I put a few impressions on my Facebook timeline, even though Facebook is blocked by China’s Great...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 7

DIAPHANES No. 6/7
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 6/7

He would say “Never work!”

Old-school publisher, avant-garde dandy, undisputed expert on the global history of Dada: Raphaëlle Milone paints an intimate but unsparing portrait... ABO FR

Raphaëlle Milone

Dachy Alive

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the late nineteenth century Alfred Jarry created a prototype of the modern wannabe in his pot-bellied Père Ubu, a figure that raises entitlement to a high art. Ubu doesn’t want to be king; others urge him to it. But he is also the others. And when he does become... OPEN
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Zoran Terzić

The Tautomaniac

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... ABO DE FR

Soham Gupta

Angst

Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem looks back and ahead in the light of the spectacle of aesthetic capitalism, which has become even... ABO FR DE

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Tomb for Guy Debord

How could Dante be avant-garde?

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death?

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

Behind the Great Firewall

I sit in the lobby of a hotel in China where I am accommodated along with other guests of an academic colloquium. Set in the middle of a vaguely Tuscan landscape, it includes a golf course, a thermal spa, and an extensive colony of holiday homes. Skyscrapers and the Yellow...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 5

Artificial and Other Intelligences

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so many skyscrapers, so many people, so much technology! And such wonderful noodle soups! I put a few impressions on my Facebook timeline, even though Facebook is blocked by China’s Great...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 7

Saturnaaaaalia

The rebellion of the signifiers against their semantic taming OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

Oratio Soluta

I remember

So wie geplant kommt es ja selten, meistens ergibt sich etwas halt so. Das ist weniger der Zustand der Welt als eine mutlose Haltung und Rechtfertigung, dafür, dass man sein Leben nicht selbst forsch in die Hand genommen hat. Es sind die höheren oder die hinterhältigen Mächte, Schicksal. Die Suche nach...

Fritz Senn

Das Leben besteht aus gestrandeten Konjunktiven

The yoke of being, noteworthy dis-position

It wasn’t nature and its dangers that forced domestication and enabled the economic shrine. Temple and funerary cult, sacrifice and distribution of the meat—for Homer all sacrificial animals were still hieria, holy creatures—and the containment of wildness led to symbolic and socio-cultural change, which became the vector and motor of... OPEN
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Andreas L. Hofbauer

Yoke

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

I remember

So wie geplant kommt es ja selten, meistens ergibt sich etwas halt so. Das ist weniger der Zustand der Welt als eine mutlose Haltung und Rechtfertigung, dafür, dass man sein Leben nicht selbst forsch in die Hand genommen hat. Es sind die höheren oder die hinterhältigen Mächte, Schicksal. Die Suche nach...

Fritz Senn

Das Leben besteht aus gestrandeten Konjunktiven

Your story begins with a tunnel.

I’m standing in my perfectly fitting uniform with its freshly-pressed swastika armband in a long line at an American office. I’m waiting to submit my Application for Total War. Then, after standing in line for hours, the friendly clerk tells me that I need The Application for Foreign Aggressions in... OPEN
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Angelika Meier

Who I Really Am

I really should not have hired him…

I really should not have hired him, but he seemed like he could fill in for my regular cook. Schneider had called in sick it seemed like it could drag on, so I took him on without too much fuss. He was a stocky, small man who could speak only... ABO DE FR

Jochen Thermann

The Assistant Chef

Je me souviens

Une Trinité de mémoire Je me souviens de quelques lieux, de quelques parfums d’enfance. En Amérique du Sud, en Equateur, à Guayaquil, dans les années cinquante. Trois lieux, trois visions, des sensations nouvelles – celles de la découverte de la vie –, une source d’inspiration pour mon travail à venir, pour mon...

Joseph Morder

Une Trinite de la Memoire

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

Ξένος extraneus του έξω όχι του μέσα (intraneus) όχι της οικίας unheimlich όχι του heim όχι της εστίας της άλλης πλευράς της πόρτας – fores, foreigner όχι υπερβολικά στον ρυθμό, odd όχι κανονικός όχι συνήθης σπάνιος ιδιάζων seltsam παράξενος besherat γενναίος κομψός απρόβλεπτος στραβός verschroben λοξός αναπάντεχος εξαιρετικός εκπληκτικός   Είναι εκπληκτικό... OPEN
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Jean-Luc Nancy

Zah Zuh

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

On Memory Atrophy

Externalized memory had always proceeded by contractions, summaries, reductions, selections, breaks in flow, as well as by organization, classification, boiling down. Card catalogues reduced thousands of works to a few key notions; tables of contents contracted the hundreds of pages in a given book. The sign itself was the first... OPEN
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Maël Renouard

The Twilight of Classi­fication?

Bang Bang Baroque

On the first gaze the works of Emma Waltraud Howes seem incongruously out of time. Visiting her studio, one enters... ABO

Emma Waltraud Howes

Questionnaire Emma Waltraud Howes

Digital disrupture

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,... OPEN
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Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

Do you want to believe in language?

Asleep, Patrick sees what he doesn’t believe while he’s awake. 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. But they’re slow shutter pictures of the past.   Five minutes past four, Patrick... OPEN
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Dietmar Dath

Your Sprache Never Was

I say

Nicole Bachmann’s latest work, I say, has the performer practice a text, sense a word in the mouth, calling it... ABO

Nicole Bachmann

Questionnaire Nicole Bachmann

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

“Poetry must be made by all. Not by one.”

“Nuestro Norte es el Sur” = “Our North is the South.” OPEN
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Mário Gomes

The Poetics of Architecture

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Venice, Lagos, and the Spaces in between

How about some string?

I said “Would you like a rope? You know that haul you have is not secured properly.” “No,” he said, “but I see you have string!” “If this comes into motion—” I said, “you should use a rope.” “Any poison ivy on that? ” he asked me, and I told him my rope... ABO DE

Diane Williams

Bang Bang on the Stair

The last philosopher. The zen-queen.

– In what way are you a communist – since we need to define this: someone who is convinced that a totally different form of organization of communal life would be good for the human race, –   – Isn’t that equally true of monarchists and leaders of sects?   – ...with a focus... OPEN
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Ann Cotten

Dialogs

A Questionnaire: Tom Kummer

I got to know Tom Kummer in 2006 while editing his book Blow Up in nighttime telephone calls to Los...

Tom Kummer

Questionnaire Tom Kummer

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

This is not your blood.

      What was your first thought today? A snow storm apparently hits New York City. I’m wondering if today or tommorrow.   Is it true? I’m not sure.   East or West? East, if anything.   How old is your consciousness? 28 years old.   What is the problem with solutions? Unchosen choices constantly create all the countless parallel worlds.   Can you recite a poem? I...

Aya Momose

Questionnaire Aya Momose

Hermal

Im Gegensatz zu anders lautenden, und neuerdings immer wieder erhobenen, Behauptungen, ergreifen wir hier die Gelegenheit kurz nachzuweisen, dass wissenschaftlich ernstzunehmende und empirisch belegbare Grundlagen und Ausweise für Konstrukte, wie sie im Folgenden knapp angerissen werden, schlichtweg nicht existieren. Zwar hat Plinius d. Ä. in seinem Buch XXXVI vom Tempel...

K.A.

Hermal

Track the clouds

heal slowly… when the deed is done… when coming back is nowhere… we slide our hands through sloping fountains… ABO

Julien Maret

IN EXTREMIS

Exodus. Gods and Kings

But why Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings, from 2014? You will have had your reasons, and you’ll have to... OPEN
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Trmasan Bruialesi

Lieber Paul 1

Je me souviens…

Je me souviens de l’étymologie du mot « souvenir ». En latin impérial subvenit mihi ­signifiait : « il me vient à l’esprit ». Le verbe avait eu les sens de survenir et de soutenir, de venir en aide. Le français en a fait « souvenir », terme qu’emploient parfois...

Jean-Luc Nancy

Je me souviens (Jean-Luc Nancy)

 

I remember

Taking a lead from Joe Brainard and Georges Perec, DIAPHANES wishes to initiate personal, cultural, and historical reminiscence. Not simply the evocation of a collective memory but the opening up of significantly charged past moments to a future perspective, the deflection of retrospect into prospect, and—not least in times of political restoration—the necessary liberation of the imagination from other pasts and outmoded utopias.

I remember

Johanna Went, 08.06.2021

I remember during the frozen Tokyo winter of 1997: I took long walks in the dead of night through the...

I remember

Urs Engeler, 03.07.2017

Ich erinnere mich an mein Exemplar von Alles kurz und klein, das weg ist, verschwunden! – wer erinnert sich, es...

I remember

Jerome Charyn, 03.07.2017

A Little Paris Nightmare

I loved Paris, even as a little boy, long before I lived there. I was like Pinocchio wandering about in some strange Land of Toys. I...

Other columns
  • John Donne’s Paradoxes and Problems

    John Donne’s Paradoxes and Problems

    …rather alarms, to truth to arm her than enemies, and they have only this advantage to scape from being called ill things, that they are nothings…

  • Questionnaire

    Red oder Blue? Welche Götter? What’s wrong with reality? Nord oder Süd? Wie sterben? What is the problem with solutions?

  • Future Pluperfect

    We are looking for relics of visions of the future in past image spaces, for the traces and signatures of something once imaginable and timelessly possible.

  • L’œuvre d'art n’a pas d’idée, elle est idée

    L’œuvre d'art n’a pas d’idée, elle est idée

    L’œuvre d'art n’a pas d’idée, elle est idée

Magazine Special

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…

Now the dead will no longer be buried, now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself, now human bodies will expectorate fury and envision their own transformation or negation, now infinite and untold catastrophes are imminently on their way —ready to cross the bridge over the river Aire and engulf us all — in this winter of discontent, just beginning at this dead-of-night ­instant before midnight, North-Sea ice-particles already crackling in the air and the last summer long-over, the final moment of my seventeenth birthday, so we have to go, the devil is at our heels… And now we’re running at full-tilt through the centre of the city, across the square beneath the Purbeck-marble edifice of the Queen’s ­Hotel, down towards the dark arches under the railway tracks, the illuminated sky shaking, the air fissured with beating cacophony,...

ABO
Magazine Special
Hurrah!

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

Hurrah!

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

ABO

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»Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.


Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: DELINE THE MARE.


Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. BASTA! I will see if I can see.


See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.«


James Joyce

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