User account

Magazine

Content
Stephen Barber . A War of Fragments: World Versus America . . . . . Maël Renouard . The Twilight of Classi­fication? . . . . . . . . . . Lieber Paul 3 . . . . . Facebook’s Just a Nail Studio . . . . . Dietmar Dath . Your Sprache Never Was . . . . . . . . . . After This Comes That Before That Comes This . . . . . I say . . . . . Drag-nets . . . . . Bang Bang Baroque . . . . . BELISAR by François Gérard . . . . . Dieter Mersch . Digital Criticism . . . . . Corporate Love . . . . . Marcus Quent . Verrinnen der Zeit und Glaube an die Welt . . . . . Elena Vogman . Dynamography, or Andrei Bely’s Rhythmic Gesture . . . . . Maël Renouard . Fragmente eines unendlichen Gedächtnisses . . . . . Maël Renouard . Modifications infimes et considérables . . . . . Dietmar Dath . Your Sprache Never Was . . . . . Stephen Barber . Krieg aus Fragmenten: World Versus America . . . . . Dieter Mersch . Digital Criticism . . . . . Marcus Quent . Elapsing Time and Belief in the World
Web Magazine

Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

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

Dieter Mersch

The machine remains alien to any mechanical limitation. 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
ACCESS DE
Contributors
Subscription

Magazine Subscription

  • Read all online articles and receive our magazine in print and PDF format

  • 4 Issues

    Magazine issues + Basic Digital + gift

    Buy
  • DIAPHANES bag »Shut your eyes and read!«

    gift: DIAPHANES bag »Shut your eyes and read!«

    Cotton bag with long loop handles, bottom and side gusset: 38 x 42 cm, handles 70 cm

  • Our subscriptions include postage and are automatically extended on expiry. You will be informed two weeks prior to renewed deduction at the latest. Subscriptions can be canceled at any time up to 1 week before expiry.

 

We like !
DIAPHANES No. 11
DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

On Gestational Communism

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

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

Surrogate Abolition

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

DIAPHANES No. 10
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 10

Punk’s raptures are mystical.

Iggy showed the error of human existence, the breathless nearness of death, and the lure of fun and action. He... ABO

Simon Critchley

Learning to Eat Time with One’s Ears

Sex creates love and love creates sex

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

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, Richard Hell

"I’d rather live in a book"

The Disobedience of the Word

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
ACCESS DE

Sina Dell’Anno

Punk / Philology

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

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

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Junk Philology. An Anti-Commentary

The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

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

Donatien Grau

A Life in 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

Each showroom has a couple of “managers”.

Do I really know the person I’ve watched every day on screen for months? I know many things, like where... ABO DE

Present.Perfect.

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
ACCESS DE

Mengia Tschalaer

Queer Spaces

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
ACCESS FR

Claire Fontaine

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

Practice in collective destruction

We recklessly count on ethics coming from somewhere other than a practice only offered by party politics or activism, from which the majority population excludes itself. The panic invocation of Christian values shows the extent of the dilemma here: please come up with something, anything, that will make people behave... OPEN
ACCESS DE

Kai van Eikels

Do in What's Doing, Democracy in!

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

Why should this be art?

I Hate the Avant-Garde. When an artist as self-ironic and self-reflective as Yuri Albert makes such a statement about art, then skepticism is called for. Like his overall series Elitist-Democratic Art, the title deliberately plays with simple affirmations and negations, and at the same time exhibits the inherent receptive dilemma... ABO DE

Sandra Frimmel

I Hate the Avant-garde

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

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

Charlemagne Rides through Paris

Facebook’s algorithm has served up memories of my Turkish travels often enough, but now it’s taking countermeasures and suddenly presenting quite different entries from my so-called timeline. For example, this blurred photograph of an equestrian statue of Charlemagne, unfortunately barely visible, with vassals. I had noticed him a few years ago...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 6

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

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

Charlemagne Rides through Paris

Facebook’s algorithm has served up memories of my Turkish travels often enough, but now it’s taking countermeasures and suddenly presenting quite different entries from my so-called timeline. For example, this blurred photograph of an equestrian statue of Charlemagne, unfortunately barely visible, with vassals. I had noticed him a few years ago...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 6

“Can you imagine something like that?”

The curators were probably worried that someone would stumble carelessly up the stairs while looking at the exhibits—could I simply have gone past the first object at the bottom? Number 1, “Formless Veil, curtain …” Must have been attached to the wall just between the entrance and exitus … “My... OPEN
ACCESS DE

Axel Dielmann

The Dressmaker

Be Jack!

Like no other actor, Uma Thurman bears a face as a trace of itself. The most recent emanation of this... OPEN
ACCESS DE

Michael Heitz, Hendrik Rohlf

Uma’s Face—Thurman’s Voice

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

Enjoy!

The strongest current reflections on the power struggles raging beyond the pleasure principle. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Michael Heitz

Wong Ping’s "Who’s the Daddy"

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

So many egoists call themselves artists…

“So many egoists call themselves artists,” Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny on May 15, 1871. Even though that is not always obvious, ‘I’, the first person, is the most unknown person, a mystery that is constantly moving towards the other two, the second and third persons, a series of unfoldings... OPEN
ACCESS DE

Maria Filomena Molder

The Alms of Time

On Trees, Neophytes, and Druids

The beech, the opponent of the druids, should be disestablished! OPEN
ACCESS DE

Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger

Homeland Fictions

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
ACCESS FR FA DE

Jean-Luc Nancy

Zah Zuh

Why the Backwards Smile?

To what extent can a revolution of the inner world impact the external, material world surrounding us? OPEN
ACCESS DE

Slavs and Tatars

Reverse Joy

Il testo ignoto è una promessa

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
ACCESS DE FR

Michele Pedrazzi

The Next Bit. Corpo a corpo con l’ignoto

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

It was Gilles Deleuze who in various contexts underlined that what we most lacked was “belief in the world.” The odd remark appears, for example, in a conversation in 1990 with the Italian Marxist Antonio Negri about revolutionary emergence and the political force of minorities. In this dialogue Negri examines... OPEN
ACCESS DE

Marcus Quent

Elapsing Time and Belief in the World

Lieber Paul 3

Trmasan Bruialesi

Lieber Paul 3

Corporate Love

Gilles Rotzetter

Corporate Love

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

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

Wolfgang Plöger

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

On Realism

The limp, voluptuous decadence of the place

I’m not going to talk about my profession here. ABO FR DE

Bruce Bégout

The Man from Venice

Is drama out cold? Is theatre?

Can contemporary theatre recognize itself in the boxing ring so that its fist, the fist of the past, strikes a... ABO DE

Alexander García Düttmann

Can There Be a Society Without Ceremony or the Critical Question of Theatre

A swansong. Death in Venice, reenacted

I have rarely left the Biennale so dissatisfied and tired as this year. No, it wasn’t the endless kilometers.

Barbara Basting

Dear Paolo Baratta

Hurrah!

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

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

A Diary of my Encounters

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

LISTMANIA

Vonceptually sensory bills of fare, enumerations and selections…

LISTMANIA

Self-portrait

“This self-portrait is dated March 1962. I had returned from a mission as radio­man..."

Pierre Guyotat

Autoportrait

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

No Respite

Critical thought that amounts to nothing more than questioning given positions, in negotiating existing conflict between parties, is none. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Marcus Quent

No Respite

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

 

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

Fritz Senn, 27.10.2018

So wie geplant kommt es ja selten, meistens ergibt sich etwas halt so. Das ist weniger der Zustand der Welt...

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
  • 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

  • LISTMANIA

    LISTMANIA

    Vonceptually sensory bills of fare, enumerations and selections…

  • FICTIONARY

    FICTIONARY

    Not on any Knowlede’s service this register in progress seeks accumulating entries of imagenables: names, objects, imaginations… singularities, that neither have to be thought nor upon which must be speculated.

  • 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.

Magazine Special

Stephen Barber

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.

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.

OPEN
ACCESS DE
Magazine Special
Ornamentation is the body of our thought

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
ACCESS

My language
English

Selected content
English

Change

»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

Editionen