Books

The story of violence against women constantly disappears even as it is continuously told, re-told. Might a Story Knife play a role in reversing such erasure?

feminism
archaeology
gender
body
violence

Discourse

Anna-Lisa Dieter (ed.), Daniel Tyradellis (ed.)

A dynamic element, rather than a passive object

Water is ubiquitous: we drink it, bathe in it, encounter it as rain, ice, or river. And yet it remains contradictory— both familiar and strange.

society
Limnology
exhibition
global ecology

Humanities

Muriel Fischer (ed.), Sandra Frimmel (ed.), ...

The Power of Narratives in Propaganda

Narratives are the enduring stars of propaganda and disinformation.

Russia
propaganda
intelligence sercive
analytics of power

Magazine

Surrogacies

Myths and visions of motherhood and fathering, brings together artistic and theoretical positions on reproduction and communication, gender and genus, addressing and conception.

body
father figure
queer theory
feminism
contemporary art
aesthetics
mother figure
motherhood
gender

Magazine Online

News + Events

BOOKLAUNCH DEBERLINISIERUNG | DEBERLINIZATION

01.11.2026, 14:00 – 30.11.2026

140 years after the end of the Berlin/Congo Conference (1884–85) The Deberlinization Festschrift reflects on the urgency and potentials of a Deberlinization process.

HKW

01.11.26 – 14:00 – BOOKLAUNCH DEBERLINISIERUNG | DEBERLINIZATION

The Deberlinization Festschrift, curated by Ibou Coulibaly Diop, Franck Hermann Ekra, and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung reflects on the urgency and potentials of a Deberlinization process.

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:<br>Art, Magazine, Books

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

You are invited to enjoy the ungoing exhibition of artworks, leave through our printed magazine or read up on twenty years of publishing in almost 1000 books.

diaphanes_net

New releases

Anna-Lisa Dieter (ed.), Daniel Tyradellis (ed.): On Water

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (ed.): Deberlinization

Giuseppe Di Salvatore (ed.), Fabienne Liptay (ed.): The Sirenic: Follow the Water, Follow the Sound

Eliana Hernández-Pachón: Suspended Waters

Cristina Rivera Garza: De-Blading the Knife

Kevin B. Lee (ed.), Marine de Dardel (ed.), ...: The Future of Reality

Observing the Spectator

Article

Complicity in Spectatorship

The special case of lustful murdering soldiers of King Herod and the introduction of spectators on frescos by Giotto and pulpits by the Pisani are at the core of this contribution, which poses the question: How is cruelty visualized in Italy around 1300? The introduction of detached spectators in opposition...

Beate Fricke

Complicity in Spectatorship

Article

On Holocaust and Art

Slavoj Žižek discusses the aestheticization of the Holocaust. Contrary to the much-debated arguments which call into question the presentability of the unpresentable, Žižek defends the idea that an »aestheticization« of the Holocaust trauma is imperative. It is not poetry that has become impossible after Auschwitz, but prosa – because it... ABO

Slavoj Žižek

»Description without a Place«

Article

Crowds and Audiences on the Walls of St. Clement, Ohrid

Crowds and audiences populate the painted walls of the late thirteenth-century church of Saint Clement in Ohrid, Macedonia. This paper examines how these depictions invite different kinds of audience participation. It analyzes inscriptions and liturgical texts as well as architectural and pictorial evidence, in order to delineate a variety of...

Andrew Griebeler

Audiences on the Walls of St Clement

Article

Loyalty Made Visible

In 1640, after 60 years of Iberian Union under the rule of the Hispanic monarchy, Portugal re-installed her own king again: John IV from the Bragança Dynasty. This central event in Portugal’s history had to be communicated not only to the European nations but also to all the regions that...

Urte Krass

Loyalty Made Visible

To lay a hand on the shoulder of future victims…

»By using voices I have rediscovered what we call humanity.«

OPEN
ACCESS

Current Texts

A coffin to bury the statues of the ancestors

I was initially slightly sceptical of the ramifications and undertones of Renzo Martens’ project in central Congo…

OPEN
ACCESS

Africa
museum
colonial history
colonialism
contemporary art
sculpture

Current Texts

“Fuck that thing.” That’s all punk needs.

Donatien Grau, James Spooner

“The thing about punk is that you’re allowed to talk about anything. Kids can talk about whatever they want. There’s nobody saying, ‘No, you can’t do that, it’s not punk.’” OPEN
ACCESS

Slavs and Tatars

To what extent can a revolution of the inner world impact the external, material world surrounding us? OPEN
ACCESS DE

Ute Holl

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

Michele Pedrazzi

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
ACCESS DE FR

Arts

Reality, No More?

Marine de Dardel (ed.), Kevin B. Lee (ed.), ...

The Future of Reality

“Reality is all we have to love. There is nothing else.” John Berger

Everyday life without audiovisual technologies is no longer imaginable. How do we experience reality in the age of generative AI, algorithmic media, and the omnipresence of digital platforms? How does cinema—and all audiovisual media— construct, challenge and reimagine reality in times of ecological, political, and technological transformation?

art
sound
film
contemporary art

Arts

Ornamentation is the body of our thought

Elena Vogman

With Bely, a continuum is continuously produced between visceral organic states, political states of society and meteorological states of the world. OPEN
ACCESS

»Three hundred people left The House that Jack Built. I think that’s very good, and it wasn’t Cannes.« ABO DE

Tyler Coburn

However convincingly space agencies justify the enormous budgets, there’s one gratuitous expense: training astronauts for free fall. ABO

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
ACCESS

Arts

Simon Critchley

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 was like a much better-looking version of Schopenhauer.

ABO

Arts

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands.

OPEN
ACCESS DE

ritual
spiritism
Africa
colonialism
feminism
ceremony
performance
body

Books

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): The Human Face and Other Writings on His Drawings

Wolfgang Brückle (ed.), Fred Truniger (ed.): Display, Distribute, Disrupt

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Last Writings of Antonin Artaud

Fiction

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

This issue explores practices of human and non-human substitution.

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...

body
gender
motherhood
contemporary art
mother figure

Fiction

Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
ACCESS

Diane Williams

How about some string?

I said “Would you like a rope? You know that haul you have is not secured properly.” ABO DE

Kim Gordon

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
ACCESS

Johannes Binotto

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

Fiction

Dodie Bellamy

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

Fiction

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

Books

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): “Here Lies” preceded by “The Indian Culture”

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Radio Works: 1946–48

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): A Sinister Assassin

Yann Le Bras, Jean Paul Mongin: The Death of Socrates

Discourse

Digital disrupture

Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

The machine remains alien to any mechanical limitation.

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, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result...

OPEN
ACCESS DE

Discourse

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

“If you love your family, you want family abolition for them!” ABO DE

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
ACCESS

Stephen Barber

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. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Michael Heitz

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

Discourse

A.K. Kaiza

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 the age for facts.

OPEN
ACCESS DE

Discourse

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

Hurrah!

We rehearsed the crowd scenes in the Winter Palace, in the Throne Room and the Armorial Hall.

ABO

Authors

Books

Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

Liliana Gómez (ed.), Fabienne Liptay (ed.): Eco-operations

Gertrud Koch: Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Photographic Archive

Humanities

Let’s find the stage of human affairs

Marion Muller-Colard, Clémence Pollet

Hannah Arendt's Little Theater

“A story worth telling is a story with spectators to judge it.”

While about to finish her last book, the philosopher Hannah Arendt is disturbed by her stubborn alter ego, 9-year-old Little Hannah. Reluctantly, the old woman lets herself drag out onto the streets of New York and into constant conversation by the inquisitive little girl. They enter a little theatre, and together they watch mankind, society, politics, power evolve – and they also experience the role of Evil (in the person of a wolf and of numerous wooden puppets) and its...

thinking
acting
ethics
Evil
young readers

Humanities

Ines Kleesattel

Thérèse ayant douleurs menstruelles could be a beginning. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Zoran Terzić

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the post-avant-garde era we’re all either in the vanguard or asleep in the lap of capital. In this sense everybody is avant-garde—or nobody. OPEN
ACCESS DE

The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

Donatien Grau

Philology keeps it possible to open a space for the minority. OPEN
ACCESS FR

Sina Dell’Anno

The rebellion of the signifiers against their semantic taming OPEN
ACCESS DE

Humanities

Jean-Luc Nancy

غریبه‌ها غریبه‌ها

ازخودبیگانه‌ ها راه‌ گم‌کرده‌ ها از کدامین اصل نامرئی؟

Etrange (غریب) در زبان فرانسوی از ریشه لاتین extraneus به معنای «خارجی» در برابر داخلی intraneus است. آنچه از خانه نیست unheimlich (امر غریب) از heim (خانه) نیست از منزل نیست در طرف دیگر دروازه fores است foreigner (خارجی)، خارج از ضرب و زیادی است odd (زاید) ناهنجار نامعمول نادر کمیاب تکی است seltsam (عجیب) عجیب و غریب besherat رشید ظریف پراوهام خمیده‌‌ verschroben (بد خو) خمیده شگفت‌ آور خارق‌ العاده حیرت‌ انگیز

غنای زبان امری غریب است در کلماتی که به نحوی حولِ مفهومِ غریبِ خارجی ausländer شکل گرفته اند خارج از کشور «هم‌‌ کشور ما» همانگونه که پیش‌ تر در فرانسه می‌ گفتیم «این کشور من است» برای اشاره به کسی از روستای من محله‌ ی من استان من ولایت من