Books

The book tells the story of Lili and Siegfried Kracauer’s close working relationship – from the early 1930s following their marriage in Germany, to exile in Paris and the war and post-war years in the USA.

exile
20th century
portrait
collection
photographic images
Paris
1950s
Siegfried Kracauer
photography
History of photography
biography
1930s
archive

Discourse

Ines Weizman

Haifa’s architectural modernism

Ines Weizman synchronises different narratives that have been swept away by the chaotic hurricanes of time.

Middle East
Israel
history of architecture
memory

Humanities

Jean Paul Mongin, François Schwoebel

Of what can I be truly certain?

doubt
dream
religion
Descartes
young readers
certainty
epistemology
subjectivity
mind-body problem
thinking

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.

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

Magazine Online

News + Events

diaphanes_net

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

New releases

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback (ed.), David Payne (ed.): Breaking Grounds

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: In Touch: Encounters between Art and Research

Hauke Branding (ed.), Julian Volz (ed.): Radical Desires

Beate Söntgen (ed.), Katharina Tchelidze (ed.), ...: Scenes of the Avant-Garde

Observing the Spectator

Article

The Moving Spectator in Medieval Italian Art

This essay traces the importance of monumental art in Erwin Panofsky’s evolution of perspectival space by critically analyzing his concept of a Raumkasten (»space-box«). In Panofsky’s 1920s work, the teleological development between bodies and space from the 11th to the 14th centuries plays a crucial role in the history of...

Christopher Lakey

From Place to Space

Anthology

Involving the Beholder

The invention of depicting figures participating in an event — nameless bystanders, beholders, and onlookers — marks an important change in the ways artists addressed the beholder of the artworks themselves. This shift speaks to a significant transformation of the relationship between images and their audience. The public in the...

Beate Fricke (ed.), Urte Krass (ed.)

The Public in the Picture / Das Publikum im Bild

Article

Il corpo senza organi dell'opera d'arte

Nach einer (R.D. Laing, dem Pionier der antipsychiatrischen Bewegung folgenden) Skizzierung von Antonin Artauds schizophrenen Symptomen, konzentriert sich der Beitrag auf das charakteristischste unter ihnen: Artauds Ablehnung der anatomischen Struktur des Körpers, welche die Organe zwingt, in einer hierarchisch organisierten und auf Produktivität fokussierten Struktur zu funktionieren. Artaud strebte dagegen...

Eleonora Sparvoli

Il corpo senza organi dell'opera d'arte

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«

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

Current Texts

Eric Baudelaire

A for Anomie

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

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, and anomie. Merton (1938) identifies anomie as a cultural condition of frustration, in which values regarding goals and how to achieve them conflict with limitations on the means of achievement.

Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan, “Research on Terrorism and Countering Terrorism”, Crime and Justice, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2009.

B for Block or Blocked

If terrorism in each of its expressions can be considered an indicator of the existence of a political block (of an impossibility of reacting if one wishes to react differently), this influences its real ability to modify the situation. Terrorism has been historically more successful when it was not...

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Current Texts

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

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

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

Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
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Kim Gordon

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
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Arts

Pioneering!

Manuel Franquelo

An interview with Manuel Franquelo

"Trying to compete in the economy of attention from the field of contemporary art is a naive goal in the twenty-first century."

There are almost no publications about him, for a painting he takes a whole year, for his photographic works he develops the hardware himself, and the software along with it, and he has only exhibited twice in his entire career. The trained engineer is involved in large projects on facsimileing and 3D reproduction for museums, but his skill is largely applied to his own slowly and brilliantly developing work. Manuel Franquelo is an artist of unusual radicalism, both in the autonomy...

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Arts

Slavs and Tatars

To what extent can a revolution of the inner world impact the external, material world surrounding us? OPEN
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
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When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker going slow

Soham Gupta

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

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

Arts

»This is not my blood.«

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

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Video art
identity
human–animal communication
performance art

Arts

Michele Pedrazzi

Il testo ignoto è una promessa

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

OPEN
ACCESS DE FR

reading
time
music
media theory
electronic music

Authors

Books

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

Mario Schulze (ed.), Sarine Waltenspül (ed.): String Figures

Wiktoria Furrer, Carla Gabrí, ...: How to Teach Art?

Donatien Grau, Sylvère Lotringer: I Was More American than the Americans

Mathilde Arnoux (ed.), Maria Bremer (ed.): Westkunst, 1981

Sabine Gebhardt Fink (ed.), Andrej Mircev (ed.): Revolving Documents—Narrations of Beginnings, Recent Methods and Cross-Mappings of Performance Art

Fiction

An immodest proposal

Stephen Barber

A War of Fragments: World Versus America

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 the Ballard estate declined permission for any images of pages from the World Versus America archival notebooks to accompany this essay, any member of the general public interested to do...

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Fiction

Dodie Bellamy

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats. OPEN
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Jean-Luc Nancy

غریبه‌ها غریبه‌ها

ازخودبیگانه‌ ها راه‌ گم‌کرده‌ ها از کدامین اصل نامرئی؟ OPEN
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Jochen Thermann

I really should not have hired him…

Waldemar—well, that was not actually his name… ABO DE FR

Julien Maret

Track the clouds

heal slowly… when the deed is done… when coming back is nowhere… we slide our hands through sloping fountains… ABO

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

Pierre Guyotat

The matrix for »Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats«

“This text was written at the end of 1962, after my return from Algeria. For me the text is the matrix for Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats.” P.G.

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war
war experience

Authors

Books

Allison Grimaldi Donahue: The History of Breathing

Matthias Arégui, Yan Marchand: Martin Heidegger's Grouch

Gleb J. Albert (ed.), Nikolaj Evreinov, ...: The Steps of Nemesis

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

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...

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Discourse

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
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Tyler Coburn

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

Ute Holl

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

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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Discourse

Sina Dell’Anno

The Disobedience of the Word

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.”

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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

Liza Mattutat (ed.), Roberto Nigro (ed.), ...: What’s Legit?

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...: On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

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

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

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

Humanities

Ornamentation is the body of our thought

Elena Vogman

Dynamography, or Andrei Bely’s Rhythmic Gesture

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

The experience of the Russian Revolution transformed both the perception and the epistemic notion of time. It challenged artistic and scientific modes of production with the invention of new models of temporality. Nonlinear, morphological, and materialist models of time seemed to correspond more precisely to the irruptive event of the revolution. These echoed more the new political constellation than a historicist or purely philosophical notion of a homogeneous time as a condition a priori to any experience. New theories in...

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Humanities