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Arts

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

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

gender
mother figure
contemporary art
body
motherhood
poetry

Fiction

Joachim hat ein ganz feines Gespür für Untertöne

»Sich auf eine ganz plane Zeitleiste legen, Aqua quasi, liquid timing, Nahleben, das Jetzt schauen, ver-stehst-du-mich?«

short stories
satire
contemporary literature
the absurd
laughter
avant-garde

Discourse

Haifa’s architectural modernism

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

memory
Middle East
history of architecture
Israel

Humanities

Siegfried Kracauer, Philippe Despoix (ed.), ...

Essays on Photography by Siegfried Kracauer

media theory
Siegfried Kracauer
History of photography
photography
film

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
body
feminism
contemporary art
father figure
motherhood
mother figure
gender
aesthetics

Magazine Online

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

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

New releases

Maaza Mengiste: Of Interest to the General Public

Karin Gludovatz, Matthias Warstat, ...: Intervenierende Künste

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

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

The Subject of Capitalism

Article

Con Artist Don Draper, the archetypical American hero

At the very moment when the black figure falls through the vintage snap shots the loss of world seems complete.

Elisabeth Bronfen

The American Dream—A Game of Confidence

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

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

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

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

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Karl Marx
monotheism
film
exile
communism

Current Texts

Hurrah!

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

ABO

Current Texts

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

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

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

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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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
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Arts

Jiji-Crycry

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

“Here Lies” preceded by “The Indian Culture”

Me, Antonin Artaud, I am my son, my father, my mother, and me.

The two poetic works collected together here as Here Lies preceded by Indian Culture were created as a partly improvised vocal performance dictated during one session on 25 November 1946, based on provisional notes, and transcribed by Artaud’s collaborator Paule Thévenin at Artaud’s pavilion in Ivry-sur-Seine. The two works together form one of the outstanding experiments of Artaud’s final period. Those two works were published in one volume in Paris on 20 January 1948 by the small poetry publisher K...

avant-garde
literature
poetry
drugs

Arts

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

Michele Pedrazzi

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? 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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»Three hundred people left The House that Jack Built. I think that’s very good, and it wasn’t Cannes.« ABO DE

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

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

Sex creates love and love creates sex

“I don’t believe in progress, no.”

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philology
music

Authors

Books

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Photographic Archive

Daniel Berndt (ed.), Susanne Huber (ed.), ...: ambivalent work*s

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

Fiction

“Obsessed with buffering”

Tom McCarthy

Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer

Towards the end of Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the stumbling ingénue of a hero Tyrone Slothrop sets off on a commando raid. The territory he and his cohorts move through is a giant metropolis, a “factory-state” in which capital, technology and power, perfectly co-calibrated, send airships drifting through urban canyons, past chrome caryatids and roof-gardens on skyscrapers that themselves shoot up and down on elevator-cables: a conurbation Pynchon calls the “City of the Future” or “Raketen-Stadt.” The...

ABO

conversation
literary studies
literature
fiction
Modernism

Fiction

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

Dietmar Dath

Do you want to believe in language?

The index calculates everything. Announcements of awards, mostly false, light up then die. His dopamine balance feeds the list. Limbic structures support it. Brain means house, should have windows. OPEN
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“Poetry must be made by all. Not by one.”

Mário Gomes

“Nuestro Norte es el Sur” = “Our North is the South.” OPEN
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Johannes Binotto

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

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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

Books

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

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Watchfiends and Rack Screams

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

Yan Marchand, Vincent Sorel: Diogenes the Dog-Man

Frédéric Morlot, Anne-Margot Ramstein: Albert Einstein's Bright Ideas

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

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? 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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Michael Heitz, Hendrik Rohlf

Like no other actor, Uma Thurman bears a face as a trace of itself. The most recent emanation of this apparently indestructible construct, so successfully created for Kill Bill, can be seen in the latest film by Lars von Trier. OPEN
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Discourse

Donatien Grau, James Spooner

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

“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.’”

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Discourse

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

Authors

Books

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

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

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Artaud 1937 Apocalypse

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

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

Humanities

“Every human body is an old civilization”

Susanne Witzgall

“Every human body is an old civilization”

Do migrants develop more restless, mobile identities in general? Is language particularly essential with regard to finding identity?

Susanne Witzgall: One common point in your texts in that both of you describe migration as an incomplete process, as a practice that is not completed with the arrival at the destination, but perhaps even only finds its starting point, its beginning, there. For instance, you Christian Kravagna, have written in your essay that many migrants develop a practice of travelling back and forth, almost like commuting, a process in which there is no definitive home that one can return...

ABO DE

Humanities

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
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Sylvia Sasse

“Lifestyle must conform to the above-named circles of persons or be easily adapted,” “artistic talent,” “strong general education.” OPEN
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Each showroom has a couple of “managers”.

Do I really know the person I’ve watched every day on screen for months? I know many things, like where he is, where he comes from, what his home looks like, when he gets up and sleeps, etc. But do I really know him? ABO DE

Alexander García Düttmann

What does “emancipatory” mean today?

Let us pretend one more time that the world can still be saved. ABO DE

Humanities

Nothing is at home

Philosophy is found wanting. It is considered anachronistic, some say dead. The tradition is in ruins.

ABO

art theory
Modernism
phenomenology
art
aesthetics

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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