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. . . . . . Xenolinguistics . . . . . Helmut J. Schneider . Wie fern darf der Nächste sein? . . . . . Angelika Meier . Wer ich wirklich bin . . . . . Artificial and Other Intelligences . . . . . Behind the Great Firewall . . . . . Thomas Huber . Generation of the Lynn Hershman Antibody . . . . . Slavs and Tatars . Reverse Joy . . . . . Je me souviens . . . . . I remember . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Political Transplants . . . . . Boutiques on the Bosporus . . . . . Maria Filomena Molder . The Alms of Time . . . . . A.K. Kaiza . An Annotated History of Wakanda . . . . . Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger . Fiktionen von Heimat . . . . . Jochen Thermann . Der Hilfskoch . . . . . Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit. Corpo a corpo con l’ignoto . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Charlemagne Rides through Paris . . . . . A.K. Kaiza . Eine kommentierte Geschichte Wakandas . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Jochen Thermann . L’aide-cuisinier . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Helmut J. Schneider . How Distant Can My Neighbor be? . . . . . Jochen Thermann . The Assistant Chef . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Transplants politiques . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit. Hautnah am Körper des Unbekannten . . . . . Michele Pedrazzi . The Next Bit: un corps à corps avec l’inconnu . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Zah Zuh . . . . . Slavs and Tatars . Reverse Joy . . . . . Angelika Meier . Who I Really Am . . . . . Maria Filomena Molder . Die Almosen der Zeit . . . . . Damian Christinger, Monica Ursina Jäger . Homeland Fictions . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Politische Transplantate
Web Magazine
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods
Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
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Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

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
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Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them… OPEN
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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

“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
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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
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Dodie Bellamy

Plague Widow

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)

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Based on a brilliant trick

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s closeness to fascism has put him in a dubious light. Barbara Basting tells of her personal fascination... ABO DE

Barbara Basting

Marinetti Detox

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

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?

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

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

»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

Blood!

Thérèse ayant douleurs menstruelles could be a beginning. OPEN
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Ines Kleesattel

Art, Girls, and Aesthetic Freedom Down Below

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

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

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

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

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

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

Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant

Miguel Tamen

Don Quixote lisant

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

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

­Pioneering!

"Trying to compete in the economy of attention from the field of contemporary art is a naive goal in the... OPEN
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Manuel Franquelo

An interview with Manuel Franquelo

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

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?

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

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. 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

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

About ‘how we treat the others’

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

Conversation on “Glimpse”

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

Barbara Basting — The Algorithm and I

The post I’m now sharing was somewhat unsettling: “Barbara joined Facebook 6 years ago!”

Der Algorithmus und ich

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

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)

American English

»The thing is, I don't see these things on my shelf. I just stare at them.«

Hendrik Rohlf

Richard Prince (Book)

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

Tyler Coburn

Ergonomic Futures

 

Future Pluperfect

Luzia Gast, 09.06.2023

Nicht zuletzt die 2016 abgeschlossene Restaurierung hatte die These gestützt, dass es sich bei Hieronymus Boschs venezianischem Triptychon um die...

Drag-nets

Luc Meresma, 26.10.2018

It may be due to the simple design of this dust jacket, which gives no indication of genre, and to...

Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant

Miguel Tamen, 10.04.2018

The Nonexistent Giotto
A picture may announce the future not in the sense that it refers to any future events...

BELISAR by François Gérard

Christine Tauber, 13.12.2017

Although contemporaries attested Romantic ­qualities to François Gérard’s Belisar, it didn’t appeal to the arch-Romantic Delacroix: “The fortune of a...

Other columns
  • FICTIONARY

    FICTIONARY

    Not on any Knowlede’s service this register in progress seeks accumulating entries of imagenables: names, objects, imaginations… singularities, that neither have to be thought nor upon which must be speculated.

  • I remember

    I remember

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

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

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

    Raucous time capsules, rare jewels, and indispensable bulky goods from all epochs, languages, and genres.

  • LISTMANIA

    LISTMANIA

    Vonceptually sensory bills of fare, enumerations and selections…

Magazine Special
Symbolical transplants are necessary

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

ABO DE FR
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
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English

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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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