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Artificial and Other Intelligences . . . . . Michael F. Zimmermann . Courbet als Assyrer . . . . . Mengia Tschalaer . Queere Räume . . . . . Tom McCarthy . Toke My Asymptote – oder: die ekstatische Agonie des Erscheinens . . . . . Marlene Streeruwitz . Der Autor ist nicht die Autorin . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Die Verallgemeinerung des Menschen . . . . . Kai van Eikels . Macht kaputt, was Demokratie kaputt macht . . . . . A. L. Kennedy . What is an Author? . . . . . Marlene Streeruwitz . L'auteur n'est pas l'auteure . . . . . Felix Stalder . Feedback as Authenticity . . . . . A. L. Kennedy . Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ? . . . . . Felix Stalder . Feedback als Authentitzität . . . . . Tom McCarthy . Toke My Asymptote – or, The Ecstatic Agony of Appearance . . . . . Zoran Terzić . The Grand Generalization . . . . . Kai van Eikels . Do in What's Doing, Democracy in! . . . . . . Present.Perfect. . . . . . Mengia Tschalaer . Queer Spaces . . . . . . Present.Perfect. . . . . . Claire Fontaine . Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism . . . . . Claire Fontaine . Vers une théorie du matérialisme magique . . . . . A. L. Kennedy . Was ist ein Autor?
Web Magazine
The sexual asylum story

Mengia Tschalaer

“The sexual asylum story is everything,” OPEN
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Ecstasy of inauthenticity

Tom McCarthy

The ironic self-awareness of the poet can only be that of his own inauthenticity, repeated or fed back into itself at increasingly conscious levels, and ‘to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic’. ABO DE
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 he is, where he comes from, what his home looks like, when he gets up and sleeps, etc. But do I really know him? 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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

Saturnaaaaalia

The rebellion of the signifiers against their semantic taming OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

Oratio Soluta

“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

Blood!

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

Art, Girls, and Aesthetic Freedom Down Below

Enjoy!

The strongest current reflections on the power struggles raging beyond the pleasure principle. OPEN
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Michael Heitz

Wong Ping’s "Who’s the Daddy"

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

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

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

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

Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant

Miguel Tamen

Don Quixote lisant

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?

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

Corporate Love

Gilles Rotzetter

Corporate Love

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?

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

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

Wolfgang Plöger

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

­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

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

Is drama out cold? Is theatre?

Can contemporary theatre recognize itself in the boxing ring so that its fist, the fist of the past, strikes a... ABO DE

Alexander García Düttmann

Can There Be a Society Without Ceremony or the Critical Question of Theatre

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

Twenty-four hours in state of unconsciousness

Now the dead will no longer be buried, now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself, now human bodies will expectorate fury and envision their own transformation or negation, now infinite and untold catastrophes are imminently on their... ABO

Stephen Barber

Futurama Nights, October 1978

About ‘how we treat the others’

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
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Artur Zmijewski

Conversation on “Glimpse”

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

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

HER

»Nah ist fern und nichts als sattgrüne Trance.«

DJ Helioglobal

HER (Book)

Reports from Fiction

Around 2007 I had the idea of making a feature film about a German woman who is kidnapped in Iraq.... ABO DE

Peter Ott

The Monotheistic Cell Or Reports from Fiction

Self-portrait

“This self-portrait is dated March 1962. I had returned from a mission as radio­man..."

Pierre Guyotat

Autoportrait

Quaddie

“Quaddie” is a term awaiting political correction, but how else should we describe the four-armed workers genetically engineered for three fall environments? The Quaddies are the legal property of a mining company. As “post-fetal experimental tissue cultures,” they’re too many links down the Great Chain to share human rights and protections. A...

Tyler Coburn

Quaddie

 

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.

Je me souviens

Joseph Morder, 07.04.2018

Une Trinité de mémoire

Je me souviens de quelques lieux, de quelques parfums d’enfance. En Amérique du Sud, en Equateur, à...

I remember

Urs Engeler, 03.07.2017

Ich erinnere mich an mein Exemplar von Alles kurz und klein, das weg ist, verschwunden! – wer erinnert sich, es...

I remember

Marie Brassard, 03.07.2017

La soif

Quand j’étais enfant, près de la maison ou j’habitais, il y avait une voie ferrée. Avant de m'endormir, j’entendais...

Other columns
Magazine Special
Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

A. L. Kennedy

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

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

ABO DE FR
Magazine Special

Kai van Eikels

Practice in collective destruction

There is no responsibility-bearing demos without participation in political action.

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 responsibly, no mater how obviously illusory it is! But the drift into religious or ideological morality only veils a truth that any theatre performance could tell us: there is no responsible audience. There is no responsibility without a concrete opportunity to formulate an answer whose effects have the status of acknowledged consequences. There is no responsibility-bearing demos without participation in political action.

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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