User account

Magazine

Content
I remember . . . . . Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger . Fiktionen von Heimat . . . . . . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Political Transplants . . . . . A.K. Kaiza . An Annotated History of Wakanda . . . . . Behind the Great Firewall . . . . . Boutiques on the Bosporus . . . . . Jochen Thermann . Der Hilfskoch . . . . . Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant . . . . . Helmut J. Schneider . Wie fern darf der Nächste sein? . . . . . Maria Filomena Molder . The Alms of Time . . . . . Slavs and Tatars . Reverse Joy . . . . . Thomas Huber . Generation of the Lynn Hershman Antibody . . . . . Artificial and Other Intelligences . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . . Xenolinguistics . . . . . Je me souviens . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit. Corpo a corpo con l’ignoto . . . . . Charlemagne Rides through Paris . . . . . Angelika Meier . Wer ich wirklich bin . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit: un corps à corps avec l’inconnu . . . . . Jochen Thermann . L’aide-cuisinier . . . . . Jochen Thermann . The Assistant Chef . . . . . A.K. Kaiza . Eine kommentierte Geschichte Wakandas . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger . Homeland Fictions . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit. Hautnah am Körper des Unbekannten . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Angelika Meier . Who I Really Am . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Slavs and Tatars . Reverse Joy . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Politische Transplantate . . . . . Maria Filomena Molder . Die Almosen der Zeit . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Transplants politiques . . . . . Helmut J. Schneider . How Distant Can My Neighbor be?
Web Magazine
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods
Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
ACCESS

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

Strangeness is everywhere, but strangers are only where we define them. ABO DE FR
Il testo ignoto è una promessa

Michele Pedrazzi

Cosa porterà il prossimo bit? Sconvolgenti novità? Semplice ridondanza? OPEN
ACCESS DE FR
Contributors
Subscription

Magazine Subscription

  • Read all online articles and receive our magazine in print and PDF format

  • 4 Issues

    Magazine issues + Basic Digital + gift

    Buy
  • DIAPHANES bag »Shut your eyes and read!«

    gift: DIAPHANES bag »Shut your eyes and read!«

    Cotton bag with long loop handles, bottom and side gusset: 38 x 42 cm, handles 70 cm

  • Our subscriptions include postage and are automatically extended on expiry. You will be informed two weeks prior to renewed deduction at the latest. Subscriptions can be canceled at any time up to 1 week before expiry.

 

We like !
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

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"

Capitalism sucks. Tag everything.

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

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Junk Philology. An Anti-Commentary

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear? OPEN
ACCESS

Kim Gordon

The Pitch

“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

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)

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

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
ACCESS FR

Claire Fontaine

Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism

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.

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
ACCESS DE

Mengia Tschalaer

Queer Spaces

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
ACCESS DE

Kai van Eikels

Do in What's Doing, Democracy in!

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

Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem looks back and ahead in the light of the spectacle of aesthetic capitalism, which has become even... ABO FR DE

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Tomb for Guy Debord

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
ACCESS DE

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?

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

Language can never be private

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

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

Phenomena in Exile

»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

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma

Drag-nets

Be Jack!

Like no other actor, Uma Thurman bears a face as a trace of itself. The most recent emanation of this... OPEN
ACCESS DE

Michael Heitz, Hendrik Rohlf

Uma’s Face—Thurman’s Voice

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

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
ACCESS DE

Maria Filomena Molder

The Alms of Time

I really should not have hired him…

I really should not have hired him, but he seemed like he could fill in for my regular cook. Schneider had called in sick it seemed like it could drag on, so I took him on without too much fuss. He was a stocky, small man who could speak only... ABO DE FR

Jochen Thermann

The Assistant Chef

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

On Trees, Neophytes, and Druids

The beech, the opponent of the druids, should be disestablished! OPEN
ACCESS DE

Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger

Homeland Fictions

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

Zoran Terzić

Political Transplants

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 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?

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

It was Gilles Deleuze who in various contexts underlined that what we most lacked was “belief in the world.” The odd remark appears, for example, in a conversation in 1990 with the Italian Marxist Antonio Negri about revolutionary emergence and the political force of minorities. In this dialogue Negri examines... OPEN
ACCESS DE

Marcus Quent

Elapsing Time and Belief in the World

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

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
ACCESS DE

Stephen Barber

A War of Fragments: World Versus America

BELISAR by François Gérard

Christine Tauber

Belisar

DIAPHANES NO. 2
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 2

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
ACCESS DE

Ann Cotten

Dialogs

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

On Realism

About ‘how we treat the others’

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

Artur Zmijewski

Conversation on “Glimpse”

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

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

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

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

The matrix for »Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats«

“This text was written at the end of 1962, after my return from Algeria. For me the text is the... OPEN
ACCESS

Pierre Guyotat

The Prison

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

Part Dieu. The Painting of Francisco Sierra

You have to imagine Francisco Sierra as a cheerful painter. ABO DE

Michael Heitz

Another New God in Parts

 

Questionnaire

Bang Bang Baroque

Emma Waltraud Howes, 08.06.2023

On the first gaze the works of Emma Waltraud Howes seem incongruously out of time. Visiting her studio, one enters another world: meets mushrooms and corals, glass artichoke-hand grenades, the...

I say

Nicole Bachmann, 11.12.2017

Nicole Bachmann’s latest work, I say, has the performer practice a text, sense a word in the mouth, calling it forth, and another, repeating, hearing, interrupting, and another, beginning again,...

This is not your blood.

Aya Momose, 11.12.2017

The project space CORNER COLLEGE in Zurich’s 4th district has for some time now been giving invigorating impulses to both art and ­theory, and can be recommended to every visitor...

A Questionnaire: Tom Kummer

Tom Kummer, 04.07.2017

I got to know Tom Kummer in 2006 while editing his book Blow Up in nighttime telephone calls to Los Angeles. We met for the first time at the book...

Other columns
Magazine Special
Why the Backwards Smile?

Slavs and Tatars

Why the Backwards Smile?

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

OPEN
ACCESS DE
Magazine Special
Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

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 the age for facts.

OPEN
ACCESS DE

My language
English

Selected content
English

Change

»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

Editionen