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

Mengia Tschalaer

“The sexual asylum story is everything,” OPEN
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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
Critique of generic rationality

Zoran Terzić

The programs “sense” how the clients function, but not because AI is becoming more human—rather because clients now function as generically as programs. OPEN
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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

The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

Philology keeps it possible to open a space for the minority. OPEN
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Donatien Grau

A Life in Philology

Sex creates love and love creates sex

“I don’t believe in progress, no.” OPEN
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Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, Richard Hell

"I’d rather live in a book"

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)

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

Based on a brilliant trick

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s closeness to fascism has put him in a dubious light. Barbara Basting tells of her personal fascination... ABO DE

Barbara Basting

Marinetti Detox

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

How could Dante be avant-garde?

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death?

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

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

350 000 000 photographs onto Facebook everyday

The idea of making the world more open and connected has degenerated to a business concept. OPEN
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Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

What we don’t see

“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

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

Symbolical transplants are necessary

Strangeness is everywhere, but strangers are only where we define them. ABO DE FR

Zoran Terzić

Political Transplants

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

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

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

On Trees, Neophytes, and Druids

The beech, the opponent of the druids, should be disestablished! OPEN
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Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger

Homeland Fictions

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
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Marcus Quent

Elapsing Time and Belief in the World

Do you want to believe in language?

Asleep, Patrick sees what he doesn’t believe while he’s awake. The index calculates everything. Announcements of awards, mostly false, light up then die. His dopamine balance feeds the list. Limbic structures support it. Brain means house, should have windows. But they’re slow shutter pictures of the past.   Five minutes past four, Patrick... OPEN
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Dietmar Dath

Your Sprache Never Was

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma

Drag-nets

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

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

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

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

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

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
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Eric Baudelaire

Abecedarium

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. OPEN
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Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

On Realism

“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

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

Exodus. Gods and Kings

But why Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings, from 2014? You will have had your reasons, and you’ll have to... OPEN
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Trmasan Bruialesi

Lieber Paul 1

Self-portrait

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

Pierre Guyotat

Autoportrait

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

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

LISTMANIA

Vonceptually sensory bills of fare, enumerations and selections…

LISTMANIA

 

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

Fritz Senn, 27.10.2018

So wie geplant kommt es ja selten, meistens ergibt sich etwas halt so. Das ist weniger der Zustand der Welt...

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

Jerome Charyn, 03.07.2017

A Little Paris Nightmare

I loved Paris, even as a little boy, long before I lived there. I was like Pinocchio wandering about in some strange Land of Toys. I...

Other columns
  • John Donne’s Paradoxes and Problems

    John Donne’s Paradoxes and Problems

    …rather alarms, to truth to arm her than enemies, and they have only this advantage to scape from being called ill things, that they are nothings…

  • 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!”

  • 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.

  • 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

Tom McCarthy

Ecstasy of inauthenticity

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’.

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 gestures in a ‘first-hand’ or ‘authentic’ way, an obsession which he carries to the point of murder. Yet the pleasure of seeing this book receiving glowing press reviews that praised it for its ‘originality’ and ‘true’-ness was tinged with an awareness of something being odd or ‘off’, since Remainder is in fact the most un-original of novels, a novel about non-originality and simulacra that’s quite blatantly composed of set tropes and constructed situations reprised and, only slightly modified, replayed from sources ranging from Ballard’s Crash and Beckett’s Godot back to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (Uncle Toby’s domestic re-stagings of battle terrains)...

ABO DE
  • psychoanalysis
  • identity
  • Jacques Lacan
  • contemporary literature

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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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