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Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov . A Diary of my Encounters . . . . . Alexander García Düttmann . Kann es eine Gesellschaft ohne Feier geben oder Die kritische Frage des Theaters . . . . . A Questionnaire: Tom Kummer . . . . . Artur Zmijewski . Conversation on “Glimpse” . . . . . Mário Gomes . Poetik der Architektur . . . . . Bruce Bégout . L’homme de Venise . . . . . A swansong. Death in Venice, reenacted . . . . . Diane Williams . Bang Bang on the Stair . . . . . Ann Cotten . Dialoge . . . . . Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau . Über Realismus . . . . . Stephen Barber . Futurama Nights, October 1978 . . . . . Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger . Venice, Lagos, and the Spaces in between . . . . . Eric Baudelaire . Abecedarium . . . . . Mário Gomes . The Poetics of Architecture . . . . . Diane Williams . Rums Bums auf der Treppe . . . . . Bruce Bégout . Der Mann aus Venedig . . . . . Bruce Bégout . The Man from Venice . . . . . Artur Zmijewski . Gespräch über ‚Glimpse‘ . . . . . Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger . Venedig, Lagos und der Raum dazwischen . . . . . Alexander García Düttmann . Can There Be a Society Without Ceremony or the Critical Question of Theatre . . . . . Ann Cotten . Dialogs . . . . . Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau . On Realism
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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
Hurrah!

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

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

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
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DIAPHANES No. 11
DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

Pregnancy is the weirdest condition

The seahorse is the chosen metaphor for pregnant trans men ABO DE

I.V. Nuss

The Love in the Convex, in Absolute Roundness and the Sluttification of All Men West of the Bosporus

On Gestational Communism

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

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

Surrogate Abolition

Bang Bang Baroque

On the first gaze the works of Emma Waltraud Howes seem incongruously out of time. Visiting her studio, one enters... ABO

Emma Waltraud Howes

Questionnaire Emma Waltraud Howes

DIAPHANES No. 10
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 10

Sex creates love and love creates sex

“I don’t believe in progress, no.” OPEN
ACCESS

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, Richard Hell

"I’d rather live in a book"

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... ABO

Simon Critchley

Learning to Eat Time with One’s Ears

“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... OPEN
ACCESS

Donatien Grau, James Spooner

Afropunk Philology

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. OPEN
ACCESS

Dodie Bellamy

Plague Widow

The Disobedience of the Word

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
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Sina Dell’Anno

Punk / Philology

DIAPHANES No. 8/9
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 8/9

Subjectivation and Authenticity

It is human selection that turns a machine selection that is meaningless because of its compilation criteria into a (potentially)... ABO DE

Felix Stalder

Feedback as Authenticity

Ecstasy of inauthenticity

The question of authenticity and I go back some way; we’re old sparring partners – frenemies. It’s been a fraught relationship, shot through with paradox and misconstruing. My first novel, Remainder, does turn around its protagonist’s obsession with becoming ‘real’, inhabiting his era or his city, building, skin, movements and... ABO DE

Tom McCarthy

Toke My Asymptote – or, The Ecstatic Agony of Appearance

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

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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Claire Fontaine

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

Practice in collective destruction

We recklessly count on ethics coming from somewhere other than a practice only offered by party politics or activism, from which the majority population excludes itself. The panic invocation of Christian values shows the extent of the dilemma here: please come up with something, anything, that will make people behave... OPEN
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Kai van Eikels

Do in What's Doing, Democracy in!

Artificial and Other Intelligences

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so many skyscrapers, so many people, so much technology! And such wonderful noodle soups! I put a few impressions on my Facebook timeline, even though Facebook is blocked by China’s Great...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 7

DIAPHANES No. 6/7
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 6/7

Why should this be art?

I Hate the Avant-Garde. When an artist as self-ironic and self-reflective as Yuri Albert makes such a statement about art, then skepticism is called for. Like his overall series Elitist-Democratic Art, the title deliberately plays with simple affirmations and negations, and at the same time exhibits the inherent receptive dilemma... ABO DE

Sandra Frimmel

I Hate the Avant-garde

How could Dante be avant-garde?

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death?

Charlemagne Rides through Paris

Facebook’s algorithm has served up memories of my Turkish travels often enough, but now it’s taking countermeasures and suddenly presenting quite different entries from my so-called timeline. For example, this blurred photograph of an equestrian statue of Charlemagne, unfortunately barely visible, with vassals. I had noticed him a few years ago...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 6

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... ABO DE FR

Soham Gupta

Angst

He would say “Never work!”

Old-school publisher, avant-garde dandy, undisputed expert on the global history of Dada: Raphaëlle Milone paints an intimate but unsparing portrait... ABO FR

Raphaëlle Milone

Dachy Alive

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

»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

Lars von Trier in Conversation with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem & Raphaëlle Milone

Language can never be private

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

Shrewing the Tame

Be Jack!

Like no other actor, Uma Thurman bears a face as a trace of itself. The most recent emanation of this... OPEN
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Michael Heitz, Hendrik Rohlf

Uma’s Face—Thurman’s Voice

Behind the Great Firewall

I sit in the lobby of a hotel in China where I am accommodated along with other guests of an academic colloquium. Set in the middle of a vaguely Tuscan landscape, it includes a golf course, a thermal spa, and an extensive colony of holiday homes. Skyscrapers and the Yellow...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 5

What does “emancipatory” mean today?

Pretending one more time that the world can still be saved and asking whether art contains an emancipatory potential can be a meaningful endeavour only if illegitimate attempts at appropriating this emancipatory potential are thwarted. Its usurpation, which amounts to its abolition, must be prevented. Critique that deserves its name... ABO DE

Alexander García Düttmann

Cold Distance

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

Zoran Terzić

Political Transplants

I remember

So wie geplant kommt es ja selten, meistens ergibt sich etwas halt so. Das ist weniger der Zustand der Welt als eine mutlose Haltung und Rechtfertigung, dafür, dass man sein Leben nicht selbst forsch in die Hand genommen hat. Es sind die höheren oder die hinterhältigen Mächte, Schicksal. Die Suche nach...

Fritz Senn

Das Leben besteht aus gestrandeten Konjunktiven

Behind the Great Firewall

I sit in the lobby of a hotel in China where I am accommodated along with other guests of an academic colloquium. Set in the middle of a vaguely Tuscan landscape, it includes a golf course, a thermal spa, and an extensive colony of holiday homes. Skyscrapers and the Yellow...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 5

Je me souviens

Une Trinité de mémoire Je me souviens de quelques lieux, de quelques parfums d’enfance. En Amérique du Sud, en Equateur, à Guayaquil, dans les années cinquante. Trois lieux, trois visions, des sensations nouvelles – celles de la découverte de la vie –, une source d’inspiration pour mon travail à venir, pour mon...

Joseph Morder

Une Trinite de la Memoire

Why the Backwards Smile?

To what extent can a revolution of the inner world impact the external, material world surrounding us? OPEN
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Slavs and Tatars

Reverse Joy

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

Facebook’s Just a Nail Studio

I noticed this pattern for fingernail decoration four years ago in the window of a “nail studio” in Salisbury, south-west England. Nail studios had begun to interest me because I supposed them to be something like sociological indicator plants. How dumb or despairing must a women be to want to...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 3

On Memory Atrophy

Externalized memory had always proceeded by contractions, summaries, reductions, selections, breaks in flow, as well as by organization, classification, boiling down. Card catalogues reduced thousands of works to a few key notions; tables of contents contracted the hundreds of pages in a given book. The sign itself was the first... OPEN
ACCESS

Maël Renouard

The Twilight of Classi­fication?

Digital disrupture

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,... OPEN
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Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

An immodest proposal

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... OPEN
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Stephen Barber

A War of Fragments: World Versus America

BELISAR by François Gérard

Christine Tauber

Belisar

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

Is drama out cold? Is theatre?

Can contemporary theatre recognize itself in the boxing ring so that its fist, the fist of the past, strikes a... ABO DE

Alexander García Düttmann

Can There Be a Society Without Ceremony or the Critical Question of Theatre

About ‘how we treat the others’

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.” OPEN
ACCESS DE

Artur Zmijewski

Conversation on “Glimpse”

The last philosopher. The zen-queen.

– In what way are you a communist – since we need to define this: someone who is convinced that a totally different form of organization of communal life would be good for the human race, –   – Isn’t that equally true of monarchists and leaders of sects?   – ...with a focus... OPEN
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Ann Cotten

Dialogs

Hurrah!

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

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

A Diary of my Encounters

A Questionnaire: Tom Kummer

I got to know Tom Kummer in 2006 while editing his book Blow Up in nighttime telephone calls to Los...

Tom Kummer

Questionnaire Tom Kummer

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

Ich erinnere mich…

Ich erinnere mich an gewellte goldene Kornfelder.   Ich erinnere mich an mich; in der ­Peripherie des Bildes.   Ich erinnere mich an die Geheimpolizei Francos, wie sie mich eines nachts aus meiner Wohnung holte, wie sie mich die ganze Nacht be­fragte über meine Liebesbeziehung zu Antonio R. L. Ich erinnere mich an das...

Discoteca Flaming Star

Ich erinnere mich… (Discoteca Flaming Star)

Exodus. Gods and Kings

But why Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings, from 2014? You will have had your reasons, and you’ll have to... OPEN
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Trmasan Bruialesi

Lieber Paul 1

Track the clouds

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

Julien Maret

IN EXTREMIS

I remember

I remember during the frozen Tokyo winter of 1997: I took long walks in the dead of night through the Shinjuku Kabuki-cho district of endless bars, subterranean clubs and abandoned cinemas with Donald Richie, the American writer and film-maker, already in Tokyo for over forty ­years at that moment and...

Johanna Went

I remember (Johanna Went)

I remember

Following Georges Perec’s Memory 480: "I remember… (to be continued…)"…

Je me souviens

 

LISTMANIA

DIAPHANES is collecting lists: conceptually sensory bills of fare, enumerations and selections in the serenely fatal undertaking of classifying an unclassifiable present, of orienting ourselves through the stringing together of self-determined entries. The freely associated registers (including unequal and redundant items) are a call to attention or simply the excursive (as every list is potentially infinitely long or short) inventory of taste or consciousness.

BENIMMREGELN ZUR »VERBESSERTEN QUALITÄT DES CHINESISCHEN TOURISTEN« DES »ZENTRALEN ­KOMITEES FÜR DIE STEUERUNG DES AUFBAUS DER GEISTIGEN ­ZIVILISATION«

Tom Kummer, 03.07.2017

¡ Wenn sie im Flugzeug freie Plätze sehen, dann nicht darum prügeln !
¡ Auf gar keinen Fall darf...

NEUN GRÜNDE GEGEN SCHACH

Pierre Lusson, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, 03.07.2017

Es sei uns gestattet, hier einmal sämt­liche Gründe aufzuzählen, warum wir von Schach nichts halten.

1. Es ist ein...

25 WAYS TO MAKE LOVE TO THE EARTH

Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, 03.07.2017

1. Tell the Earth, “I love you. I can’t live without you."

2. At first you may feel embarrassed...

Other columns
Magazine Special

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...

OPEN
ACCESS
Magazine Special
About ‘how we treat the others’

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.”

OPEN
ACCESS DE
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»Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.


Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: DELINE THE MARE.


Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. BASTA! I will see if I can see.


See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.«


James Joyce

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