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

Slavs and Tatars

To what extent can a revolution of the inner world impact the external, material world surrounding us? 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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From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods
Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
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DIAPHANES No. 11
DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

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

On Gestational Communism

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

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

Surrogate Abolition

DIAPHANES No. 10
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 10

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"

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

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)

The Disobedience of the Word

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

Punk / Philology

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

How could Dante be avant-garde?

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language can never be private

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

Shrewing the Tame

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

DIAPHANES No. 4
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 4

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?

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

Honoré Daumier: Don Quixote lisant

Miguel Tamen

Don Quixote lisant

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

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

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

Lieber Paul 3

Trmasan Bruialesi

Lieber Paul 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIAPHANES No. 1
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 1

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

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
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Pierre Guyotat

The Prison

BIG BUGS

Forever! Star Shame! Cheat War Wedding Psych Suicide Dying! Love

Beni Bischof

LISTMANIA: BIG BUGS

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

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)

 

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...

Kybernetik für alle

Michael Schultze, 03.07.2017

Der Titel ist Programm. Dieses »in der hauptsache von 1962 bis 1967« geschriebene Werk ist nicht nur ein megalomanisch zusammengeclustertes Durchverdauen der bewegenden Theorien der späten 60er Jahre (Linguistik, Kybernetik,...

Materiality and corporeality

Kári Páll Óskarsson, 03.07.2017

The Three Marias is a highly interesting work of feminist literature, although it’s now largely forgotten outside of its native Portugal. In the early 70s, while the country was still...

Other columns
  • John Donne’s Paradoxes and Problems

    John Donne’s Paradoxes and Problems

    …rather alarms, to truth to arm her than enemies, and they have only this advantage to scape from being called ill things, that they are nothings…

  • Questionnaire

    Red oder Blue? Welche Götter? What’s wrong with reality? Nord oder Süd? Wie sterben? What is the problem with solutions?

  • LISTMANIA

    LISTMANIA

    Vonceptually sensory bills of fare, enumerations and selections…

  • Barbara Basting — The Algorithm and I

    Barbara Basting — The Algorithm and I

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

Magazine Special

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them…

“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 and smatterings that eventually gelled as ‘Je est un autre’. That is why ‘apocryphal’ is a literarily irrelevant concept and ‘pseudo’ a symptom, the very proof that life, writing, is made up of echoes, which means that intrusions and thefts (Borges also discusses them) will always be the daily bread of those who write.

Words from others, words taken out of place and mutilated: here are the alms of time, that squanderer’s sole kindness. And so many others, mostly others who wrote, and many other pages, all of them apocryphal, all of them echoes, reflections. All this flows together into—two centuries...

OPEN
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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

My language
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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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