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

Stephen Barber

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. OPEN
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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
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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
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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

“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

The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

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

A Life in Philology

The Disobedience of the Word

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

Punk / Philology

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

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

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

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

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
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Kai van Eikels

Do in What's Doing, Democracy in!

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.

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?

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

How could Dante be avant-garde?

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

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

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

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

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. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 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

Blood!

Thérèse ayant douleurs menstruelles could be a beginning. OPEN
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Ines Kleesattel

Art, Girls, and Aesthetic Freedom Down Below

»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.« ABO DE

Lars von Trier in Conversation with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem & Raphaëlle Milone

Be Jack!

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

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

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

On Trees, Neophytes, and Druids

The beech, the opponent of the druids, should be disestablished! OPEN
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Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger

Homeland Fictions

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

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

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
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A.K. Kaiza

An Annotated History of Wakanda

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

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

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
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Elena Vogman

Dynamography, or Andrei Bely’s Rhythmic Gesture

­Pioneering!

"Trying to compete in the economy of attention from the field of contemporary art is a naive goal in the... OPEN
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Manuel Franquelo

An interview with Manuel Franquelo

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

Lieber Paul 3

Trmasan Bruialesi

Lieber Paul 3

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. OPEN
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Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

On Realism

“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

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

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

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

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

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

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.” OPEN
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Ute Holl

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

The future has never looked older

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

Tyler Coburn

Ergonomic Futures

TWELVE DRUMMERS DRUMMING

1. Ringo Starr 2. Mike D. 3. Roland TR 808 4. Jaki Liebezeit 5. Paul Lovens 6. Anthony Williams 7. Valerie Scroggins 8. David Moss 9. Moe Tucker 10. Dannie Richmond 11. Robert Görl 12. Georgia Hubley

Hanno Leichtmann

LISTMANIA: TWELVE DRUMMERS DRUMMING

Custom Creates Law

Today’s civil law derives from traditions in which undisputed norms regulated the coexistence of members of a community in the...

Haus am Gern

Custom Creates Law

 

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

  • 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.

  • Questionnaire

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

  • 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
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Magazine Special

Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember?

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 abbreviation of experience. An epic stitched of words was an abbreviation of the war, the long years of which were reduced to a few nights of recitation; the written text that recorded the epic was a contraction of the oral narration which pushed aside its sensory richness, melody, life in a thousand details. In accumulating, every level of abbreviation reconstituted an infinite flow, a new dilation that would be contracted in its turn. From the plurality of pages to the index and the table of contents; from the plurality of books to card catalogues.

The abbreviated elements were further arranged, situated...

OPEN
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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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