User account

Magazine

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

Claire Fontaine

Becoming the translator rather than the careless exploiter of nature might be the ad­venture of humankind in the years to come. OPEN
ACCESS FR
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
Practice in collective destruction

Kai van Eikels

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

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

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

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

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)

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

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
ACCESS

Kim Gordon

The Pitch

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

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

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!

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

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. 6/7
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 6/7

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

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

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
ACCESS DE

Axel Dielmann

The Dressmaker

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

Enjoy!

The strongest current reflections on the power struggles raging beyond the pleasure principle. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Michael Heitz

Wong Ping’s "Who’s the Daddy"

Language can never be private

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

Johannes Binotto

Shrewing the Tame

Nothing is at home

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

Phenomena in Exile

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
ACCESS DE

Stephen Barber

A War of Fragments: World Versus America

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

Wolfgang Plöger

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

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

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

About ‘how we treat the others’

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
ACCESS DE

Artur Zmijewski

Conversation on “Glimpse”

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

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 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

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

No Respite

Critical thought that amounts to nothing more than questioning given positions, in negotiating existing conflict between parties, is none. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Marcus Quent

No Respite

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

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

12 May 2011 – 12 May 2017: On Non-Digital Storage Media

The Facebook algorithm has noticed that I have something to do with art and museums, and presents me with a snapshot of a Louvre ticket from the pool of my earlier posts. At the time of the post the scrap of paper had already survived for years as a bookmark...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 2

China frisst Menschen

Auf den Bänken träumen mit hochgezogenen Knien einige Bettler, Strandläufer, Chinesen und Europäer.

Damian Christinger

Huelsenbeck (Book)

 

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
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

Mengia Tschalaer

The sexual asylum story

“The sexual asylum story is everything,”

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 political superiority of the West through the myth of the ideal victim. In order to avoid the cookie-cutter victimhood framework that refers to idealizations around “Us” and “Them,” Europe must adopt a reflexive approach to queer asylum that allows for recognizing its own stereotypes in regard to homosexuality, race, and gender, so as not to reproduce colonial and imperialistic narratives of vulnerability, sex, and desire through Eurocentric asylum regimes.

OPEN
ACCESS DE
  • performativity
  • migration
  • queer theory
  • gender
  • identity

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