Books

Open for the plurality of all forms of imagination and knowledge, DIAPHANES MAGAZINE connects an interest in current tendencies with deep-rooted research, the power of fiction with nuanced judgment, aesthetic excitability with essayistic sharpness.

contemporary art
avant-garde
art
art criticism
literature
contemporary culture
discourse

Discourse

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

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

poetry
motherhood
contemporary art
gender
mother figure
body

Humanities

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

The Power of Narratives in Propaganda

Narratives are the enduring stars of propaganda and disinformation.

intelligence sercive
propaganda
Russia
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.

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

Magazine Online

News + Events

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

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Art, Magazine, Books

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New releases

Eliana Hernández-Pachón: Suspended Waters

Cristina Rivera Garza: De-Blading the Knife

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

Muriel Fischer (ed.), Sandra Frimmel (ed.), ...: Global Narratives of Russian Disinformation

Sigrid Adorf (ed.), Sønke Gau (ed.), ...: going public.

THINK ART? THINK ART!

Monograph

Around a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti

Does this buried or lost face have a name?

Georges Didi-Huberman, Mira Fliescher (ed.), Elena Vogman (ed.)

The Cube and the Face

Monograph

One plus one equals other

For an aesthetic mode of thought beyond the “linguistic turn”

Dieter Mersch

Epistemologies of Aesthetics

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

I’m not really sure what is and what isn’t theory.

Elisabeth Bronfen Tom, our idea here was that you would give us a little insight into how you find your themes, how you use theory for your texts. T.MC. I’m not really sure what is and what isn’t theory. I don’t really know where theory stops and fiction begins. If you take someone... ABO

Tom McCarthy

“Something that is not nothing”

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

Sex creates love and love creates sex

“I don’t believe in progress, no.”

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music
philology

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

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
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“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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Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them… OPEN
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Philosophy is found wanting. It is considered anachronistic, some say dead. The tradition is in ruins. ABO

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?

contemporary art
film
sound
art

Arts

Michele Pedrazzi

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

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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Artur Zmijewski

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
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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
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ritual
ceremony
colonialism
body
spiritism
feminism
performance
Africa

Arts

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

ABO DE FR

Authors

Books

Donatien Grau (ed.), Christoph Wiesner (ed.): After the Crisis

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

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Artaud the Mômo

Eva Backhaus (ed.), Grit Dommes (ed.), ...: Dynamics of the Intransitive

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

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Fotoarchiv

Fiction

All that pent up terror and rage

Dodie Bellamy

Plague Widow

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

Driving to the Castro, Bee Reaved feels hyper emotional, as she often does in the car, Nick Cave’s Ghosteen on repeat, and she thinks—this is what it’s like to live without hope. Six months after Kevin’s death, friends left her to fare for herself. Other widows warned her this would happen, that everybody would disappear before she was ready. One widow she no longer talks to said, “Wait and see, you’re going to have a total breakdown.” Now, with the...

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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… ABO

Raphaëlle Milone

Old-school publisher, avant-garde dandy, undisputed expert on the global history of Dada: Raphaëlle Milone paints an intimate but unsparing portrait of a man who belonged perhaps to a dying breed but is still remembered vividly. ABO FR

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

Like no other journal, Tel Quel was an outstanding arena of literary innovation and intellectual revolution. In this conversation its founder and publisher, Philippe Sollers, provides intimate insight and polemical hindsight into some of the most important milestones of its still-resonating era. ABO DE

Angelika Meier

Your story begins with a tunnel.

The lost cause is the only one worth fighting for. OPEN
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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

Fiction

Kim Gordon

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

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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

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

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

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

Sina Dell’Anno

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

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

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

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Discourse

Ute Holl

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

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

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communism
film
exile
monotheism
Karl Marx

Authors

Books

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

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

Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman: Before & After

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

Gertrud Koch: Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even

Humanities

Of what can I be truly certain?

Jean Paul Mongin, François Schwoebel

Mister Descartes and his Evil Genius

Can one trust his senses when perceiving the outside world? When my sensations are the basis of my perception of my own existence, what if these sensations are to be doubted – what can the proof of my own existence be? These questions, both simple and profoundly undermining, stand at the beginning of Modernity: the philosophy of René Descartes. This book drags its readers – and musketeer-like Mister Descartes himself – into the adventure of thinking. It gives a lively...