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

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

Is it possible to regain a lost belief? Is it possible to do as we will with belief? OPEN
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DIAPHANES No. 11
DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

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

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

DIAPHANES No. 10
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 10

The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

Philology keeps it possible to open a space for the minority. OPEN
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Donatien Grau

A Life in Philology

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
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Kim Gordon

The Pitch

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
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Dodie Bellamy

Plague Widow

Sex creates love and love creates sex

“I don’t believe in progress, no.” OPEN
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Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, Richard Hell

"I’d rather live in a book"

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

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

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!

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

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

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first… ABO DE FR

A. L. Kennedy

What is an Author?

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

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

How could Dante be avant-garde?

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

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

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

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

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

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

»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

The yoke of being, noteworthy dis-position

It wasn’t nature and its dangers that forced domestication and enabled the economic shrine. Temple and funerary cult, sacrifice and distribution of the meat—for Homer all sacrificial animals were still hieria, holy creatures—and the containment of wildness led to symbolic and socio-cultural change, which became the vector and motor of... OPEN
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Andreas L. Hofbauer

Yoke

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma

Drag-nets

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

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

On Trees, Neophytes, and Druids

The beech, the opponent of the druids, should be disestablished! OPEN
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Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger

Homeland Fictions

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... OPEN
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A.K. Kaiza

An Annotated History of Wakanda

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

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

Your story begins with a tunnel.

I’m standing in my perfectly fitting uniform with its freshly-pressed swastika armband in a long line at an American office. I’m waiting to submit my Application for Total War. Then, after standing in line for hours, the friendly clerk tells me that I need The Application for Foreign Aggressions in... OPEN
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Angelika Meier

Who I Really Am

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

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma

Drag-nets

Corporate Love

Gilles Rotzetter

Corporate Love

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

Wolfgang Plöger

After This Comes That Before That Comes This

Lieber Paul 3

Trmasan Bruialesi

Lieber Paul 3

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

A swansong. Death in Venice, reenacted

I have rarely left the Biennale so dissatisfied and tired as this year. No, it wasn’t the endless kilometers.

Barbara Basting

Dear Paolo Baratta

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. OPEN
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Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

On Realism

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

How about some string?

I said “Would you like a rope? You know that haul you have is not secured properly.” “No,” he said, “but I see you have string!” “If this comes into motion—” I said, “you should use a rope.” “Any poison ivy on that? ” he asked me, and I told him my rope... ABO DE

Diane Williams

Bang Bang on the Stair

Twenty-four hours in state of unconsciousness

Now the dead will no longer be buried, now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself, now human bodies will expectorate fury and envision their own transformation or negation, now infinite and untold catastrophes are imminently on their... ABO

Stephen Barber

Futurama Nights, October 1978

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

GUANAJUATONOVIEMBRE

Setlist: 1 Luminous Procuress 2 Zero 3 Brass Canon 4 Mexican Tea Party 5 Jaguar 6 New Earth 7 Gas Giants 8 Evil Love On stage: 10pm – 11pm Zuschauer, gefühlt: ca. 3.000 Zuschauer, gezählt: 5.000 Klima: abendlich auffrischend, leichte Brise, zur Nacht hin schwer abkühlend Bühnensound: zupackend Publikum: euphorisch bis euphorisch verwirrt Vor uns: Atom TM Hinter uns: Ada Backstage: Wagon Sonstiges: Fotos, Autogramme, ankuschelnde Fans

Andreas Reihse

LISTMANIA: GUANAJUATONOVIEMBRE

Self-portrait

“This self-portrait is dated March 1962. I had returned from a mission as radio­man..."

Pierre Guyotat

Autoportrait

Je me souviens…

Je me souviens de l’étymologie du mot « souvenir ». En latin impérial subvenit mihi ­signifiait : « il me vient à l’esprit ». Le verbe avait eu les sens de survenir et de soutenir, de venir en aide. Le français en a fait « souvenir », terme qu’emploient parfois...

Jean-Luc Nancy

Je me souviens (Jean-Luc Nancy)

How to Pilot an Aeroplane

With this little book I succeeded in finding my personal style doing the Flick Half Roll, the Immelmann Turn, or...

Luc Meresma

Capt. Norman MacMillan (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

 

Barbara Basting — The Algorithm and I

Artificial and Other Intelligences

Barbara Basting, 04.12.2019

Facebook’s picture tumbler is currently reminding me of my first visit to China a year ago. I was impressed: so...

Charlemagne Rides through Paris

Barbara Basting, 04.12.2019

Facebook’s algorithm has served up memories of my Turkish travels often enough, but now it’s taking countermeasures and suddenly presenting...

Boutiques on the Bosporus

Barbara Basting, 10.04.2018

I’m no longer very happy with Facebook. Recently the algorithm seems to be taking the platform into total despotism. And...

12 May 2011 – 12 May 2017: On Non-Digital Storage Media

Barbara Basting, 24.03.2017

The Facebook algorithm has noticed that I have something to do with art and museums, and presents me with a...

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.

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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.

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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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