User account

Magazine

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

Dietmar Dath

Do you want to believe in language?

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. 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

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
ACCESS

Kim Gordon

The Pitch

The Disobedience of the Word

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

Sina Dell’Anno

Punk / Philology

“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
ACCESS

Donatien Grau, James Spooner

Afropunk Philology

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"

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

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

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first… ABO DE FR

A. L. Kennedy

What is an Author?

Ecstasy of inauthenticity

The question of authenticity and I go back some way; we’re old sparring partners – frenemies. It’s been a fraught relationship, shot through with paradox and misconstruing. My first novel, Remainder, does turn around its protagonist’s obsession with becoming ‘real’, inhabiting his era or his city, building, skin, movements and... ABO DE

Tom McCarthy

Toke My Asymptote – or, The Ecstatic Agony of Appearance

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.

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!

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

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

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
ACCESS DE

Zoran Terzić

The Tautomaniac

Based on a brilliant trick

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s closeness to fascism has put him in a dubious light. Barbara Basting tells of her personal fascination... ABO DE

Barbara Basting

Marinetti Detox

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

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

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

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

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"

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

What does “emancipatory” mean today?

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... ABO DE

Alexander García Düttmann

Cold Distance

350 000 000 photographs onto Facebook everyday

The idea of making the world more open and connected has degenerated to a business concept. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

What we don’t see

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

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

Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant

Miguel Tamen

Don Quixote lisant

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

Zoran Terzić

Political Transplants

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... OPEN
ACCESS DE

A.K. Kaiza

An Annotated History of Wakanda

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

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

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. As Ballard emphasises several times in the World Versus America notebooks, he is utterly serious in his concerns and visions. Although... OPEN
ACCESS DE

Stephen Barber

A War of Fragments: World Versus America

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
ACCESS

Maël Renouard

The Twilight of Classi­fication?

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... OPEN
ACCESS

Elena Vogman

Dynamography, or Andrei Bely’s Rhythmic Gesture

BELISAR by François Gérard

Christine Tauber

Belisar

Facebook’s Just a Nail Studio

I noticed this pattern for fingernail decoration four years ago in the window of a “nail studio” in Salisbury, south-west England. Nail studios had begun to interest me because I supposed them to be something like sociological indicator plants. How dumb or despairing must a women be to want to...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 3

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

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

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

“Nuestro Norte es el Sur” = “Our North is the South.” OPEN
ACCESS DE

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
ACCESS DE

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Venice, Lagos, and the Spaces in between

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

About ‘how we treat the others’

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

Artur Zmijewski

Conversation on “Glimpse”

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

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)

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)

Boutiques on the Bosporus

I’m no longer very happy with Facebook. Recently the algorithm seems to be taking the platform into total despotism. And on top of that it’s continually being altered. Just when I’ve gotten used to the comforting stream of souvenir images, Mr. Zuckerberg decides to do away with them. Or is...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 4

12 May 2011 – 12 May 2017: On Non-Digital Storage Media

The Facebook algorithm has noticed that I have something to do with art and museums, and presents me with a snapshot of a Louvre ticket from the pool of my earlier posts. At the time of the post the scrap of paper had already survived for years as a bookmark...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 2

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...

Stephen Barber

I remember (Stephen Barber)

 

Barbara Basting — The Algorithm and I

Artificial and Other Intelligences

Barbara Basting, 04.12.2019

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so...

Behind the Great Firewall

Barbara Basting, 26.10.2018

I sit in the lobby of a hotel in China where I am accommodated along with other guests of an...

Facebook’s Just a Nail Studio

Barbara Basting, 10.04.2018

I noticed this pattern for fingernail decoration four years ago in the window of a “nail studio” in Salisbury, south-west...

12 Feb 2011 — 12 Feb 2017

Barbara Basting, 24.03.2017

Facebook recently wanted to make merry with me. To this aim it posted an entry on my notice board, which...

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…

  • The Transversal Shelf of Printed Books in Times of Accelerated Opaque Media

    The Transversal Shelf of Printed Books in Times of Accelerated Opaque Media

    Raucous time capsules, rare jewels, and indispensable bulky goods from all epochs, languages, and genres.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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
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

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