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Raphaëlle Milone . Dachy Vivant . . . . . Mehdi Belhaj Kacem . Tombeau pour Guy Debord . . . . . Charlemagne Rides through Paris . . . . . Sandra Frimmel . Ich hasse die Avantgarde . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Après les avant-gardes . . . . . Barbara Basting . Marinetti Detox . . . . . Soham Gupta . Angst . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Der Tautomane . . . . . Mehdi Belhaj Kacem . Tomb for Guy Debord . . . . . Soham Gupta . Angst . . . . . Mehdi Belhaj Kacem . Grabmal für Guy Debord . . . . . Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers . What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death? . . . . . Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers . Wofür steht der Tod der Avantgarden? . . . . . Soham Gupta . Angst . . . . . Sandra Frimmel . I Hate the Avant-garde . . . . . Barbara Basting . Marinetti Detox . . . . . Raphaëlle Milone . Dachy Alive . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Nach den Avantgarden . . . . . Zoran Terzić . The Tautomaniac
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Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem looks back and ahead in the light of the spectacle of aesthetic capitalism, which has become even more unfettered since Debord’s death. ABO FR DE

Zoran Terzić

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the post-avant-garde era we’re all ­either in the vanguard or asleep in the lap of capital. In this sense everybody ­ is avant-garde—or nobody. OPEN
ACCESS DE
How could Dante be avant-garde?

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

Like no other journal, Tel Quel was an outstanding arena of literary innovation and intellectual revolution. In this conversation its founder and publisher, Philippe Sollers, provides intimate insight and polemical hindsight into some of the most important milestones of its still-resonating era. ABO DE
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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

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
ACCESS

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)

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 Disobedience of the Word

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

Sina Dell’Anno

Punk / 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"

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?

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

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!

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
ACCESS DE

Zoran Terzić

The Grand Generalization

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?

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

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

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

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

Saturnaaaaalia

The rebellion of the signifiers against their semantic taming OPEN
ACCESS DE

Sina Dell’Anno

Oratio Soluta

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

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

Language can never be private

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

Johannes Binotto

Shrewing the Tame

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

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

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
ACCESS FR GR DE

Jean-Luc Nancy

Zah Zuh

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
ACCESS DE

Angelika Meier

Who I Really Am

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

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

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

BELISAR by François Gérard

Christine Tauber

Belisar

­Pioneering!

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

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

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

Lieber Paul 3

Trmasan Bruialesi

Lieber Paul 3

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

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

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

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

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

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

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

Ute Holl

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

ABT. DIE DUEMMSTEN BERLINER FRISÖRNAMEN

Liebhaarber Schnittstelle Schnittweise Haareszeit Friseur Pierette res capillorum Haarschneiderei über Kurz oder Lang Salon Stilkamm Wasser und Welle Ja-hairgroup - Timecutter Kommheim Haare schneiden Hairtrend-Vision Berlin HAIRLICH NATÜRLICH Kopfgeist Beate Kodat Frieseur Der Haarflüsterer® Berlin Methaarmorphosen haarjongleur Sylvia Scholz Ha(a)rmonie Haarstudio Abschnitt 22 Haar für Haar KopfKunst Friseur haargenau  & schnittig Haarstudio Mit-Schnitt Haareszeiten Flhair Kopfgeldjäger Zu den Schnittigen Haarstation (dabei das H gestaltet wie das H der Bushaltestellen) Kaiserschnitt Kamm 2 cut

Blixa Bargeld

LISTMANIA: ABT. DIE DUEMMSTEN BERLINER FRISÖRNAMEN

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

A fast trip through the American night

Mike Wilson’s literature is a fast trip through the American night, drawn in melancholy images of great beauty. ABO

Mike Wilson

Rockabilly

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

 

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

As an eminent medium of slowness, printed books appear to some as the deadwood, to others as the driftwood, of the intellect, the finding and gathering of which not only fills the shelves. As the veritable bearers of latency they hold the possibility of tracking down—unobserved and at odds with the zeitgeist — what stimulates the senses and thought in unattained present or future long past. The best examples (often discarded from libraries around the world or barely known) shine from afar like messages in bottles on the banks of time. DIAPHANES seeks out the raucous time capsules, rare jewels, and indispensable bulky goods from all epochs, languages, and genres.

Wie ein stockfischiger Schnapsrausch

Tina Schulz, 03.07.2017

Kommt ein Polizist zu einem Mann, der beschuldigt wird, seinen kleinen Sohn zu Tode geschüttelt zu haben. Wie ist denn das passiert?, will der Polizist wissen. So!, gibt der Mann...

Materiality and corporeality

Kári Páll Óskarsson, 03.07.2017

The Three Marias is a highly interesting work of feminist literature, although it’s now largely forgotten outside of its native Portugal. In the early 70s, while the country was still...

How to Pilot an Aeroplane

Luc Meresma, 11.04.2017

Capt. Norman Macmillan:
How to Pilot an Aeroplane,
George Allen & Unwin LTD: London 1942,
first edition, 110 pages

 

This book told me just what I had to know before...

Other columns
  • Barbara Basting — The Algorithm and I

    Barbara Basting — The Algorithm and I

    The post I’m now sharing was somewhat unsettling: “Barbara joined Facebook 6 years ago!”

  • Questionnaire

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

  • 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.

  • I remember

    I remember

    Following Georges Perec’s Memory 480: "I remember… (to be continued…)"…

Magazine Special
When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker going slow

Soham Gupta

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 yet unseen ways.

ABO DE FR
Magazine Special
He would say “Never work!”

Raphaëlle Milone

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 of a man who belonged perhaps to a dying breed but is still remembered vividly.

ABO 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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