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Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant . . . . . Behind the Great Firewall . . . . . . . . . . Slavs and Tatars . Reverse Joy . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . A.K. Kaiza . An Annotated History of Wakanda . . . . . Charlemagne Rides through Paris . . . . . Thomas Huber . Generation of the Lynn Hershman Antibody . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Political Transplants . . . . . Artificial and Other Intelligences . . . . . Je me souviens . . . . . Jochen Thermann . Der Hilfskoch . . . . . . Xenolinguistics . . . . . I remember . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit. Corpo a corpo con l’ignoto . . . . . Angelika Meier . Wer ich wirklich bin . . . . . Boutiques on the Bosporus . . . . . Maria Filomena Molder . The Alms of Time . . . . . Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger . Fiktionen von Heimat . . . . . Helmut J. Schneider . Wie fern darf der Nächste sein? . . . . . Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger . Homeland Fictions . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit: un corps à corps avec l’inconnu . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit. Hautnah am Körper des Unbekannten . . . . . A.K. Kaiza . Eine kommentierte Geschichte Wakandas . . . . . Maria Filomena Molder . Die Almosen der Zeit . . . . . Jochen Thermann . L’aide-cuisinier . . . . . Slavs and Tatars . Reverse Joy . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Politische Transplantate . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Transplants politiques . . . . . Helmut J. Schneider . How Distant Can My Neighbor be? . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Jochen Thermann . The Assistant Chef . . . . . Angelika Meier . Who I Really Am
Web Magazine
Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not the age for facts. OPEN
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Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them… 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

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

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)

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"

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

The Disobedience of the Word

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

Punk / 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

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.

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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
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Axel Dielmann

The Dressmaker

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

What does “emancipatory” mean today?

Pretending one more time that the world can still be saved and asking whether art contains an emancipatory potential can be a meaningful endeavour only if illegitimate attempts at appropriating this emancipatory potential are thwarted. Its usurpation, which amounts to its abolition, must be prevented. Critique that deserves its name... ABO DE

Alexander García Düttmann

Cold Distance

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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
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Angelika Meier

Who I Really Am

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

Lieber Paul 3

Trmasan Bruialesi

Lieber Paul 3

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

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma

Drag-nets

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?

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

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

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

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

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Venice, Lagos, and the Spaces in between

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.” OPEN
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Ute Holl

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

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

ABT. DIE DUEMMSTEN BERLINER FRISÖRNAMEN

Liebhaarber Schnittstelle Schnittweise Haareszeit Friseur Pierette res capillorum Haarschneiderei über Kurz oder Lang Salon Stilkamm Wasser und Welle Ja-hairgroup - Timecutter Kommheim Haare schneiden Hairtrend-Vision Berlin HAIRLICH NATÜRLICH Kopfgeist Beate Kodat Frieseur Der Haarflüsterer® Berlin Methaarmorphosen haarjongleur Sylvia Scholz Ha(a)rmonie Haarstudio Abschnitt 22 Haar für Haar KopfKunst Friseur haargenau  & schnittig Haarstudio Mit-Schnitt Haareszeiten Flhair Kopfgeldjäger Zu den Schnittigen Haarstation (dabei das H gestaltet wie das H der Bushaltestellen) Kaiserschnitt Kamm 2 cut

Blixa Bargeld

LISTMANIA: ABT. DIE DUEMMSTEN BERLINER FRISÖRNAMEN

American English

»The thing is, I don't see these things on my shelf. I just stare at them.«

Hendrik Rohlf

Richard Prince (Book)

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

 

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
Il testo ignoto è una promessa

Michele Pedrazzi

Il testo ignoto è una promessa

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza?

OPEN
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  • electronic music
  • media theory
  • time
  • reading
  • music
Magazine Special
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable?

OPEN
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  • communication media
  • communication
  • utopia
  • science fiction
  • linguistics
  • semiotics and semiology

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English

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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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