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Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger . Fiktionen von Heimat . . . . . Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant . . . . . I remember . . . . . Maria Filomena Molder . The Alms of Time . . . . . Charlemagne Rides through Paris . . . . . Angelika Meier . Wer ich wirklich bin . . . . . A.K. Kaiza . An Annotated History of Wakanda . . . . . Boutiques on the Bosporus . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . . Xenolinguistics . . . . . Helmut J. Schneider . Wie fern darf der Nächste sein? . . . . . Artificial and Other Intelligences . . . . . Slavs and Tatars . Reverse Joy . . . . . Je me souviens . . . . . . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit. Corpo a corpo con l’ignoto . . . . . Jochen Thermann . Der Hilfskoch . . . . . Thomas Huber . Generation of the Lynn Hershman Antibody . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Political Transplants . . . . . Behind the Great Firewall . . . . . A.K. Kaiza . Eine kommentierte Geschichte Wakandas . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit: un corps à corps avec l’inconnu . . . . . Maria Filomena Molder . Die Almosen der Zeit . . . . . Jochen Thermann . The Assistant Chef . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit. Hautnah am Körper des Unbekannten . . . . . Jochen Thermann . L’aide-cuisinier . . . . . Helmut J. Schneider . How Distant Can My Neighbor be? . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Transplants politiques . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Politische Transplantate . . . . . Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger . Homeland Fictions . . . . . Slavs and Tatars . Reverse Joy . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Angelika Meier . Who I Really Am
Web Magazine
Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not the age for facts. OPEN
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From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods
Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
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Il testo ignoto è una promessa

Michele Pedrazzi

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
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DIAPHANES No. 11
DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

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

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

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

All that pent up terror and rage

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats. OPEN
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Dodie Bellamy

Plague Widow

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

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
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Kim Gordon

The Pitch

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)

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

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.

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

“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
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Axel Dielmann

The Dressmaker

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma

Drag-nets

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

»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

Language can never be private

Where words are uttered, the taming is shrewed. OPEN
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Johannes Binotto

Shrewing the Tame

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
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Xenolinguistics

غریبه‌ها غریبه‌ها

Etrange (غریب) در زبان فرانسوی از ریشه لاتین extraneus به معنای «خارجی» در برابر داخلی intraneus است. آنچه از خانه نیست unheimlich (امر غریب) از heim (خانه) نیست از منزل نیست در طرف دیگر دروازه fores است foreigner (خارجی)، خارج از ضرب و زیادی است odd (زاید) ناهنجار نامعمول نادر... OPEN
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Jean-Luc Nancy

Zah Zuh

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
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Maria Filomena Molder

The Alms of Time

A Phenomenology of Compassion

After a long life marked by discrimination both as Jew and woman, and finally having achieved international academic reputation with her book on The Logic of Poetry, Käte Hamburger, in her late eighties, turned to the philosophical problem of the ethics of empathy or compassion, in German (with a significantly... ABO DE

Helmut J. Schneider

How Distant Can My Neighbor be?

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

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

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma

Drag-nets

Lieber Paul 3

Trmasan Bruialesi

Lieber Paul 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
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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
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Maël Renouard

The Twilight of Classi­fication?

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

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

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

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

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

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

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...

Stephen Barber

I remember (Stephen Barber)

Paradox I: That all things kill themselves

To affect yea to effect their owne deaths, all living are importun’d. Not by Nature only which perfects them, but by Art and education which perfects her. Plants quickned and inhabited by the most unworthy Soule, which therfore neyther will, nor worke, affect an end, a perfection, a Death. This...

John Donne

Paradox I

HER

»Nah ist fern und nichts als sattgrüne Trance.«

DJ Helioglobal

HER (Book)

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... OPEN
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Pierre Guyotat

The Prison

Part Dieu. The Painting of Francisco Sierra

You have to imagine Francisco Sierra as a cheerful painter. ABO DE

Michael Heitz

Another New God in Parts

 

Future Pluperfect

Luzia Gast, 09.06.2023

Nicht zuletzt die 2016 abgeschlossene Restaurierung hatte die These gestützt, dass es sich bei Hieronymus Boschs venezianischem Triptychon um die...

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma, 26.10.2018

It may be due to the simple design of this dust jacket, which gives no indication of genre, and to...

Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant

Miguel Tamen, 10.04.2018

The Nonexistent Giotto
A picture may announce the future not in the sense that it refers to any future events...

BELISAR by François Gérard

Christine Tauber, 13.12.2017

Although contemporaries attested Romantic ­qualities to François Gérard’s Belisar, it didn’t appeal to the arch-Romantic Delacroix: “The fortune of a...

Other columns
Magazine Special

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them…

“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 and smatterings that eventually gelled as ‘Je est un autre’. That is why ‘apocryphal’ is a literarily irrelevant concept and ‘pseudo’ a symptom, the very proof that life, writing, is made up of echoes, which means that intrusions and thefts (Borges also discusses them) will always be the daily bread of those who write.

Words from others, words taken out of place and mutilated: here are the alms of time, that squanderer’s sole kindness. And so many others, mostly others who wrote, and many other pages, all of them apocryphal, all of them echoes, reflections. All this flows together into—two centuries...

OPEN
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Magazine Special
Symbolical transplants are necessary

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

ABO DE FR

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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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