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Maël Renouard . Modifications infimes et considérables . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Barber . A War of Fragments: World Versus America . . . . . BELISAR by François Gérard . . . . . Drag-nets . . . . . After This Comes That Before That Comes This . . . . . Marcus Quent . Verrinnen der Zeit und Glaube an die Welt . . . . . Dieter Mersch . Digital Criticism . . . . . Corporate Love . . . . . Maël Renouard . The Twilight of Classi­fication? . . . . . Lieber Paul 3 . . . . . Elena Vogman . Dynamography, or Andrei Bely’s Rhythmic Gesture . . . . . Maël Renouard . Fragmente eines unendlichen Gedächtnisses . . . . . I say . . . . . Dietmar Dath . Your Sprache Never Was . . . . . Facebook’s Just a Nail Studio . . . . . Dietmar Dath . Your Sprache Never Was . . . . . Stephen Barber . Krieg aus Fragmenten: World Versus America . . . . . Marcus Quent . Elapsing Time and Belief in the World . . . . . Dieter Mersch . Digital Criticism
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Maël Renouard

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
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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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Digital disrupture

Dieter Mersch

The machine remains alien to any mechanical limitation. OPEN
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DIAPHANES No. 10
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 10

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Junk Philology. An Anti-Commentary

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... OPEN
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Simon Critchley

Learning to Eat Time with One’s Ears

The Disobedience of the Word

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

Punk / Philology

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
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Kim Gordon

The Pitch

Corona Park, Hub of theWorld

I’ve always been fascinated by globes, which is why I photographed this very special example in 2011, and the FB algorithm recently presented it to me again. It’s said to be the largest model of the world in the world. I discovered it in Corona Park in the New York...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 8

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

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!

The sexual asylum story

Successful asylum claims generally require generating a racialist, colonialist discourse that impugns the nation-state from which the asylum seeker comes. While to impugn the asylum seeker’s place of origin may well be a necessity for the purpose of asylum, it is problematic if it serves to confirm the moral and... OPEN
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Mengia Tschalaer

Queer Spaces

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first… OPEN
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A. L. Kennedy

What is an Author?

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... ABO DE

Present.Perfect.

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

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

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

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?

Camouflaged with a visual language

What Reena really wanted to know was why – in a night club, for example – do we chose, always... ABO

Malte Fabian Rauch

Where the Negative Holds Court

Everything new is a pose in the alcoves of capital

In the late nineteenth century Alfred Jarry created a prototype of the modern wannabe in his pot-bellied Père Ubu, a figure that raises entitlement to a high art. Ubu doesn’t want to be king; others urge him to it. But he is also the others. And when he does become... OPEN
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Zoran Terzić

The Tautomaniac

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

Language can never be private

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

Shrewing the Tame

Nothing is at home

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

Malte Fabian Rauch

Phenomena in Exile

“Can you imagine something like that?”

The curators were probably worried that someone would stumble carelessly up the stairs while looking at the exhibits—could I simply have gone past the first object at the bottom? Number 1, “Formless Veil, curtain …” Must have been attached to the wall just between the entrance and exitus … “My... OPEN
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Axel Dielmann

The Dressmaker

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

»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.« OPEN
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Lars von Trier in Conversation with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem & Raphaëlle Milone

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
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Xenolinguistics

Corona Park, Hub of theWorld

I’ve always been fascinated by globes, which is why I photographed this very special example in 2011, and the FB algorithm recently presented it to me again. It’s said to be the largest model of the world in the world. I discovered it in Corona Park in the New York...

Barbara Basting

Der Algorithmus und ich 8

So many egoists call themselves artists…

“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... OPEN
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Maria Filomena Molder

The Alms of Time

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

A Phenomenology of Compassion

After a long life marked by discrimination both as Jew and woman, and finally having achieved international academic reputation with her book on The Logic of Poetry, Käte Hamburger, in her late eighties, turned to the philosophical problem of the ethics of empathy or compassion, in German (with a significantly... ABO DE

Helmut J. Schneider

How Distant Can My Neighbor be?

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

Do you want to believe in language?

Asleep, Patrick sees what he doesn’t believe while he’s awake. 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. But they’re slow shutter pictures of the past.   Five minutes past four, Patrick... OPEN
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Dietmar Dath

Your Sprache Never Was

BELISAR by François Gérard

Christine Tauber

Belisar

Lieber Paul 3

Trmasan Bruialesi

Lieber Paul 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
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Maël Renouard

The Twilight of Classi­fication?

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma

Drag-nets

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Venice, Lagos, and the Spaces in between

The limp, voluptuous decadence of the place

I’m not going to talk about my profession here. ABO FR DE

Bruce Bégout

The Man from Venice

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

A for Anomie

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,... OPEN
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Eric Baudelaire

Abecedarium

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

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

HER

»Nah ist fern und nichts als sattgrüne Trance.«

DJ Helioglobal

HER (Book)

Quaddie

“Quaddie” is a term awaiting political correction, but how else should we describe the four-armed workers genetically engineered for three fall environments? The Quaddies are the legal property of a mining company. As “post-fetal experimental tissue cultures,” they’re too many links down the Great Chain to share human rights and protections. A...

Tyler Coburn

Quaddie

Who is the bait? Who is the catch?

Dire works on the bogus regime—not just of art—but endowed with wit, beauty and irresistible fetish character.

Luc Meresma

Natural Enemies

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

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

Dream, Clouds, Off, Exile

LISTMANIA

Vonceptually sensory bills of fare, enumerations and selections…

LISTMANIA

 

The Transversal Shelf of Printed Books in Times of Accelerated Opaque Media

As an eminent medium of slowness, printed books appear to some as the deadwood, to others as the driftwood, of the intellect, the finding and gathering of which not only fills the shelves. As the veritable bearers of latency they hold the possibility of tracking down—unobserved and at odds with the zeitgeist — what stimulates the senses and thought in unattained present or future long past. The best examples (often discarded from libraries around the world or barely known) shine from afar like messages in bottles on the banks of time. DIAPHANES seeks out the raucous time capsules, rare jewels, and indispensable bulky goods from all epochs, languages, and genres.

Wie ein stockfischiger Schnapsrausch

Tina Schulz, 03.07.2017

Kommt ein Polizist zu einem Mann, der beschuldigt wird, seinen kleinen Sohn zu Tode geschüttelt zu haben. Wie ist denn das passiert?, will der Polizist wissen. So!, gibt der Mann...

How to Pilot an Aeroplane

Luc Meresma, 11.04.2017

Capt. Norman Macmillan:
How to Pilot an Aeroplane,
George Allen & Unwin LTD: London 1942,
first edition, 110 pages

 

This book told me just what I had to know before...

American English

Hendrik Rohlf, 11.04.2017

Richard Prince: American English
Sadie Coles HQ/Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König: London/Köln, 2003
Limited Edition, ohne Paginierung

 

Das Foto mit der Frau auf dem Fahrrad wiederholt sich auf der...

Other columns
Magazine Special
Ornamentation is the body of our thought

Elena Vogman

Ornamentation is the body of our thought

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

OPEN
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Magazine Special

Stephen Barber

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.

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 so can readily visit the British Library and view the notebooks in their entirety in the freely-­accessible manuscripts collection there.

OPEN
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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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