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Arts

Pioneering!

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

Fiction

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?

trauma
migration
emigration
past
National Socialism
post-war generation
primal scene
memory
post-war period
identity
homosexuality
youth
autobiography
childhood
1968

Discourse

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...

How can withdrawal be represented?

Constellations of different instances of withdrawal, ranging from passivity, failure, and refusal to disappearance and remembrance and to resilience and resistance.

protest movements
contemporary art
artistic practice
resistance

Humanities

The Moses complex’s place is exile.

The Moses complex is complex, because its topological space is differentiated as a relationship of ratios, resonances, and interferences.

exile
Arnold Schönberg
opera
Jean-Marie Straub
political theory
Danièle Huillet
community
psychoanalysis
migration

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.

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

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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

The Subject of Capitalism

Article

The endless array of merchandise

In contemporary capitalism, subjectivity is the product of a mass industry organized on a global level. For Félix Guattari this is actually the first and most important of capitalist productions, because it preconditions and is part of production in all other forms of merchandise. Subjectivity is a ‘key merchandise,’ which... ABO

Maurizio Lazzarato

The Production of Subjectivity

Article

Multiples, Authorship and the Eighteenth-Century Portrait Bust’s Aura

Using the example of the portrait bust as a genre, this paper will explore the ambiguous and problematic relationship between aura and the multiple in the eighteenth century. During this period the portrait bust emerged as an ambitious mode of representation, assuming close attention on the part of the viewer...

Malcolm C. Baker

Multiples, Authorship and the Eighteenth-Century Portrait Bust’s Aura

Monograph

Mad Men, Death and the American Dream

Matthew Weiner’s series Mad Men is more than a resonant time capsule. Elisabeth Bronfen’s claim is that the show not only thrives on a significant double voicing, reviving the literature, film, music and fashion of the past within and for the cultural concerns of the present. With Don Draper an...

Elisabeth Bronfen

Mad Men, Death and the American Dream

Article

We need more planetary dimensions!

My life-long engagement in the project of nomadic subjectivity rests on a specific cartography of our globalised times, marked by large-scale and technologically-mediated transformations of our social, economic and political universes. I start from the assumption that, as a result of these upheavals, traditional forms of self-representation, familiar cultural points... OPEN
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Rosi Braidotti

Nomadic Subjects

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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Current Texts

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 experience
war

Current Texts

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

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
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Ute Holl

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.” OPEN
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Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
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Arts

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...

contemporary art
motherhood
mother figure
body
gender

Arts

Simon Critchley

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

Tyler Coburn

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

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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A coffin to bury the statues of the ancestors

Clémentine Deliss

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

Arts

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

ABO DE FR

Authors

Books

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

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

Alex Arteaga (ed.): Architectures of Embodiment

Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

Fiction

Empty Diagonal

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Antoine d’Agata

Diagonale du vide

A ghostly France: Emptiness and explosiveness behind the lines.

“If there is an artist capable of making these vacuums speak, it is d’Agata. To show what is not visible, to make present what can not be represented. There is a visual 'spectralism' about Antoine. It is about recording the spasms of humanity that is committing suicide, which has access to all the information needed to know what it is doing, and yet does nothing to revert the trend. We documented this suicide during a week of shared driving, of...

contemporary art
photography
France
revolution
community

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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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… ABO

The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

Donatien Grau

Philology keeps it possible to open a space for the minority. OPEN
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Axel Dielmann

“Can you imagine something like that?”

The curators were probably worried that someone would stumble carelessly up the stairs while looking at the exhibits… OPEN
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Fiction

Kim Gordon

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

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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

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

“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
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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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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
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Discourse

»Self-censorship is the worst.«

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

ABO DE

film d'auteur
contemporary art
cinema
Evil
film

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
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Authors

Books

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Fotoarchiv

David Graeber: Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking

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

Alexander Kluge, Joseph Vogl: Soll und Haben

Humanities

Questioning the United Fruit Company archive

Liliana Gómez

Archive Matter

On the very make-up of the United Fruit Company’s neocolonial plantation machine

The United Fruit Company archive is the point of departure for this book’s reflections about the constructions but also the contested meanings of photography and thus about how the camera both depicts and configures the Caribbean as a laboratory of the modern. As archives emerge, they are resurgent, may change over the course of time, mold space anew, or revise history. By their nature archives are Pandora’s box, the outcome of opening them necessarily unknown, bringing the possibility of detournements....