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

Mengia Tschalaer

“The sexual asylum story is everything,” OPEN
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Practice in collective destruction

Kai van Eikels

There is no responsibility-bearing demos without participation in political action. OPEN
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DIAPHANES No. 11
DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

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

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

The Disobedience of the Word

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

Punk / Philology

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
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Junk Philology. An Anti-Commentary

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

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?

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
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Claire Fontaine

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

Nothing is at home

Philosophy is found wanting. It is considered anachronistic, some say dead. The tradition is in ruins. ABO

Phenomena in Exile

“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

Saturnaaaaalia

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

Oratio Soluta

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

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

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

I really should not have hired him…

I really should not have hired him, but he seemed like he could fill in for my regular cook. Schneider had called in sick it seemed like it could drag on, so I took him on without too much fuss. He was a stocky, small man who could speak only... ABO DE FR

Jochen Thermann

The Assistant Chef

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

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

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

Lieber Paul 3

Trmasan Bruialesi

Lieber Paul 3

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

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
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Marcus Quent

Elapsing Time and Belief in the World

Corporate Love

Gilles Rotzetter

Corporate Love

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

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

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”

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

“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

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

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

Human Oddities

»The future of humankind?« is the final question beneath this picture.

Oliver Hendricks

Human Oddities (Book)

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

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

Je me souviens…

Je me souviens de l’étymologie du mot « souvenir ». En latin impérial subvenit mihi ­signifiait : « il me vient à l’esprit ». Le verbe avait eu les sens de survenir et de soutenir, de venir en aide. Le français en a fait « souvenir », terme qu’emploient parfois...

Jean-Luc Nancy

Je me souviens (Jean-Luc Nancy)

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

 

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...

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...

Other columns

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • Questionnaire

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

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
Subjectivation and Authenticity

Felix Stalder

Subjectivation and Authenticity

It is human selection that turns a machine selection that is meaningless because of its compilation criteria into a (potentially) meaningful narrative.

ABO DE

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English

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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

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