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Arts

Issue 10 out soon!

About two things that have everything and nothing to do with one another

discourse
literature
authorship
art

Fiction

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

Me?

This tongue between four gums,
this meat between two knees,
this piece of hole
for madmen.

poetry
psychiatry
literature
avant-garde

Discourse

A dialogue that doesn’t cover up its traces

Anarchism is about the possibility of a crowd becoming smarter.

anarchy
political theory
resistance
community
anarchism

Humanities

“Aboard ship! ye philosophers!”

“I’ve heard the silent cries that filled the air, the reticence of the sirens when Odysseus, mast-bound, sailed past. Hark!”

history of philosophy
literary studies
the sea

Magazine

Authenticity and Feedback

DIAPHANES 8/9 looks into curious loops of reproduced present, the integral of circular I-effects, the other side of the social Möbius strip.

authorship
literature
discourse
art

Magazine Online

News + Events

ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND WORDS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:<br>The magazine, its authors and their books

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
The magazine, its authors and their books

The University of Chicago Press – Spring 2021

New releases

Simon Maurer (ed.), Daniel Morgenthaler (ed.): Refaire le monde

Ulrike Bergermann (ed.), Monika Dommann (ed.), ...: Connect and Divide

Shusha Niederberger (ed.), Cornelia Sollfrank (ed.), ...: Aesthetics of the Commons

Erich Hörl (ed.), Nelly Y. Pinkrah (ed.), ...: Critique and the Digital

Alex Arteaga (ed.): Architectures of Embodiment

David Graeber: Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking

Autofiction—Metafiction

Monograph

“Obsessed with buffering”

In this essay, based on a talk he gave in Zurich, award-winning British novelist Tom McCarthy ("Remainder", "C", "Satin Island")... ABO

Tom McCarthy

Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer

Article

»The camera is my »exosomatic extension‹.«

But how can an art in the name of the specific be the lingua franca of globalized art? OPEN
ACCESS

Gertrud Koch, Michael Lüthy, Bernhard Schieder, Allan Sekula

A Walk With Allan Sekula Through His Exhibition

Monograph

Born too late to see the war, too soon to forget it.

Why this past? Why is this past mine? A past which I did not even know?

Reiner Schürmann

Origins

Article

“I fled Europe as one flees one’s parents’ house“

I recognize that lobby. The Washington Hilton. Men in business suits are crammed in there by the thousands. American philosophers meeting for a convention. A compact assembly of thinkers. Thirty-five hundred of them, Newsweek published the figure. The eastern division of the American Philosophical Association. I make a tour of...

Reiner Schürmann

How I Try to Sell Myself to the Americans

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…

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Africa
museum
colonial history
contemporary art
colonialism
sculpture

Current Texts

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

ceremony
ritual
spiritism
performance
body
Africa
colonialism
feminism

Current Texts

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
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To lay a hand on the shoulder of future victims…

Donatien Grau, Pierre Guyotat

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

Malte Fabian Rauch

What Reena really wanted to know was why – in a night club, for example – do we chose, always and above all, that nothing happens?” ABO

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

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

Arts

»… Consistently Abused and Forced…«

Christoph Schlingensief's »Freakstars 3000«

However, the discussions about Schlingensief’s film were sparked by the same, or similar, questions as in the case of Disabled Theater: have the performers been exposed? Have they been declared incompetent, or ridiculed?

When non-disabled artists such as Jérôme Bel or Christoph Schlingensief in their productions work with actors who, in hegemonic discourse, are referred to as disabled, they almost invariably face criticism over the exploitation and voyeuristic exhibition of these people. Bel’s Disabled Theater anticipated such reservations and took a good deal of wind out of its critics’ sails by having the performers themselves raise these issues on stage and report on their families’ reactions to the piece. Nevertheless, the question whether...

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identity
Jérôme Bel
disability studies
performing arts
aesthetics

Arts

What is the problem with solutions? Blind or deaf? Which faith? What knowledge? Duchamp or Warhol? East or west? OPEN
ACCESS

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

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

We cannot assume that all government/terrorist interactions will take the form of a two-person zero-sum game. OPEN
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Arts

Tyler Coburn

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

Arts

Soham Gupta

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 yet unseen ways.

ABO DE FR

Books

Dieter Mersch: Epistemologies of Aesthetics

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Photographic Archive

Philippe Despoix (ed.), Siegfried Kracauer, ...: The Past's Threshold

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

Fiction

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

A. L. Kennedy

What is an Author?

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first…

The one who takes the temperature of widespread amphetamine dreams, who carves out screaming headlines to turn up the heat. The one who makes every morning a dose of paranoia, an uptick of fathomless rage. When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first, taking words and dipping them in shit, upending meanings and rewriting sanity. The one who writes the speeches for the tiny and furious men. The one who frames every demand, every statement...

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Fiction

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

Tom McCarthy

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’. ABO DE

Ann Cotten

The last philosopher. The zen-queen.

In what way are you a communist – since we need to define this. OPEN
ACCESS DE

“Poetry must be made by all. Not by one.”

Mário Gomes

“Nuestro Norte es el Sur” = “Our North is the South.” OPEN
ACCESS DE

Fiction

Stephen Barber

Twenty-four hours in state of unconsciousness

Now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself…

Now the dead will no longer be buried, now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself, now human bodies will expectorate fury and envision their own transformation or negation, now infinite and untold catastrophes are imminently on their way —ready to cross the bridge over the river Aire and engulf us all — in this winter of discontent, just beginning at this dead-of-night instant before midnight, North-Sea ice-particles already crackling in the air and the last summer long-over, the final moment of my seventeenth birthday, so we have to go, the devil is at our heels… And now we’re running at full-tilt through the centre of the city, across the square beneath the Purbeck-marble edifice of the Queen’s Hotel, down towards the dark arches under the railway tracks, the illuminated sky shaking, the air fissured with beating cacophony,...

ABO

Fiction

Johannes Binotto

Language can never be private

Where words are uttered, the taming is shrewed.

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theatre / drama
feminism
gender
language
subjectification
Shakespeare

Authors

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...

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Discourse

350 000 000 photographs onto Facebook everyday

Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

The idea of making the world more open and connected has degenerated to a business concept. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Sylvia Sasse

“Lifestyle must conform to the above-named circles of persons or be easily adapted,” “artistic talent,” “strong general education.” OPEN
ACCESS DE

Sina Dell’Anno

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

Peter Ott

Around 2007 I had the idea of making a feature film about a German woman who is kidnapped in Iraq. It was supposed to be a chamber piece, shot on two intradiegetic cameras. ABO DE

Discourse

Ute Holl

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

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

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monotheism
Karl Marx
communism
film
exile

Discourse

Michael Heitz

Part Dieu. The Painting of Francisco Sierra

You have to imagine Francisco Sierra as a cheerful painter.

ABO DE

God
painting
iconography
motive

Authors

Books

Alexander Kluge, Joseph Vogl: Soll und Haben

Elisabeth Bronfen: Mad Men, Death and the American Dream

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Antoine d’Agata: Diagonale du vide

Gertrud Koch: Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even

Humanities

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

An Annotated History of Wakanda

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.

The movie Black Panther, which has become the most successful superhero movie of all time, imagines Wakanda in a very specific and maybe even slightly emancipatory way. Black Panther, now the king of the concealed super-state, faces his current archenemy Killmonger, who wants to distribute arms to the Global South for an uprising against neoliberal imperialism. The scene that introduces Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, the antagonist to Ryan Coogler’s newly imagined hero, takes place in a museum. Killmonger (played by a mesmeric...

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Humanities

Alexander García Düttmann

Can contemporary theatre recognize itself in the boxing ring so that its fist, the fist of the past, strikes a forceful and violent blow? ABO DE

Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem looks back and ahead in the light of the spectacle of aesthetic capitalism, which has become even more unfettered since Debord’s death. ABO FR DE

Helmut J. Schneider

A Phenomenology of Compassion

How to make the strange person our “neighbor”? ABO DE

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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Humanities

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them…

“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 and smatterings that eventually gelled as ‘Je est un autre’. That is why ‘apocryphal’ is a literarily irrelevant concept and ‘pseudo’ a symptom, the very proof that life, writing, is made up of echoes, which means that intrusions and thefts (Borges also discusses them) will always be the daily bread of those who write.

Words from others, words taken out of place and mutilated: here are the alms of time, that squanderer’s sole kindness. And so many others, mostly others who wrote, and many other pages, all of them apocryphal, all of them echoes, reflections. All this flows together into—two centuries...

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Humanities