User account

Magazine

Content
I remember . . . . . Behind the Great Firewall . . . . . Boutiques on the Bosporus . . . . . . Xenolinguistics . . . . . Jochen Thermann . Der Hilfskoch . . . . . Thomas Huber . Generation of the Lynn Hershman Antibody . . . . . A.K. Kaiza . An Annotated History of Wakanda . . . . . Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant . . . . . Maria Filomena Molder . The Alms of Time . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Political Transplants . . . . . Je me souviens . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit. Corpo a corpo con l’ignoto . . . . . Helmut J. Schneider . Wie fern darf der Nächste sein? . . . . . Angelika Meier . Wer ich wirklich bin . . . . . . . . . . Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger . Fiktionen von Heimat . . . . . Charlemagne Rides through Paris . . . . . Slavs and Tatars . Reverse Joy . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Artificial and Other Intelligences . . . . . Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger . Homeland Fictions . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit: un corps à corps avec l’inconnu . . . . . Jochen Thermann . L’aide-cuisinier . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Maria Filomena Molder . Die Almosen der Zeit . . . . . Helmut J. Schneider . How Distant Can My Neighbor be? . . . . . Angelika Meier . Who I Really Am . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Slavs and Tatars . Reverse Joy . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Politische Transplantate . . . . . Jochen Thermann . The Assistant Chef . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Transplants politiques . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit. Hautnah am Körper des Unbekannten . . . . . A.K. Kaiza . Eine kommentierte Geschichte Wakandas
Web Magazine
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods
Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
ACCESS
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
ACCESS DE
Il testo ignoto è una promessa

Michele Pedrazzi

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

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

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

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

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
ACCESS

Dodie Bellamy

Plague Widow

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 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

Language can never be private

Where words are uttered, the taming is shrewed. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Johannes Binotto

Shrewing the Tame

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
ACCESS DE

Andreas L. Hofbauer

Yoke

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

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma

Drag-nets

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant

Miguel Tamen

Don Quixote lisant

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

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

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?

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
ACCESS

Xenolinguistics

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

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

Wolfgang Plöger

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

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

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
ACCESS DE

Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

Corporate Love

Gilles Rotzetter

Corporate Love

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

A for Anomie

A for Anomie The idea that terrorism and other forms of political violence are directly related to strains caused by strongly held grievances has been one of the most common explanations to date and can be traced to a diverse set of theoretical concepts including relative deprivation, social disorganization, breakdown, tension,... OPEN
ACCESS

Eric Baudelaire

Abecedarium

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 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

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

“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

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)

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

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

12 Feb 2011 — 12 Feb 2017

Facebook recently wanted to make merry with me. To this aim it posted an entry on my notice board, which is actually closed to others. Because of the trolls. But for the FB people this barricade apparently doesn’t apply. Must be in the small print. The post I’m now sharing... ABO

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 1

Ich erinnere mich…

Ich erinnere mich an gewellte goldene Kornfelder.   Ich erinnere mich an mich; in der ­Peripherie des Bildes.   Ich erinnere mich an die Geheimpolizei Francos, wie sie mich eines nachts aus meiner Wohnung holte, wie sie mich die ganze Nacht be­fragte über meine Liebesbeziehung zu Antonio R. L. Ich erinnere mich an das...

Discoteca Flaming Star

Ich erinnere mich… (Discoteca Flaming Star)

 

LISTMANIA

DIAPHANES is collecting lists: conceptually sensory bills of fare, enumerations and selections in the serenely fatal undertaking of classifying an unclassifiable present, of orienting ourselves through the stringing together of self-determined entries. The freely associated registers (including unequal and redundant items) are a call to attention or simply the excursive (as every list is potentially infinitely long or short) inventory of taste or consciousness.

BENIMMREGELN ZUR »VERBESSERTEN QUALITÄT DES CHINESISCHEN TOURISTEN« DES »ZENTRALEN ­KOMITEES FÜR DIE STEUERUNG DES AUFBAUS DER GEISTIGEN ­ZIVILISATION«

Tom Kummer, 03.07.2017

¡ Wenn sie im Flugzeug freie Plätze sehen, dann nicht darum prügeln !
¡ Auf gar keinen Fall darf...

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CLOUD NAMES

Dorothee Scheiffarth, 24.03.2017

Cumulus tuba ;
Cirrus cumulonimbogenitus ;
Wallcloud ;
Bannerwolke ;
Föhnfische ;
mother-of-pearl cloud ;
Altocumulus translucidus ;
Stratocumulus...

BIG BUGS

Beni Bischof, 24.03.2017

Forever!

Star

Shame!

Cheat

War

Wedding

Psych

Suicide

Dying!

Love

Other columns
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
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
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