DIAPHANES 11 orbits around the “ambiguities of the maternal significate” (Kittler) and speculates about the idea of humanity as an “absolute family”(Novalis).

This issue explores practices of human and non-human substitution, plays with the myths and visions of motherhood and procreation, ­gathers artistic and theoretical positions on ­reproduction and communication, gender and genus, addressing and conception.

What claims the place of the nuclear family in the face of hybrid kinships and social freezing? What could new elective kinships be in times of chatbots and pseudonymisation? Is this the time for surrogate mother tongues and extra-human ­rhetorics of surrogation?

Sophie Lewis claims a gestational ­communism and hunts our grannies. Barbara Vinken ­reflects on spiritual motherhood, Luciana Parisi on ­human automata and gendered proxies. For ­Zuzana Cela, language is a foreign body that can be ­invaginated. Werner Hamacher strolls through mother museum, which is also a brothel. ­Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi discovers the evolutionary  disobedience of the girl and Thierry de Duve a completely different pleasure with Joseph. Rudi Nuss tells of the new love for ­pregnant men, Allison Grimaldi Donahue of bad kinship in the house of language, M. NourbeSe Philip of a foreign fear. Leda Bourgogne, Lucile Boiron, Lena Kunz and Emma Waltraud Howes occupy the place of these attributions with their images.