User account

Magazine

Content
Charlemagne Rides through Paris . . . . . Mehdi Belhaj Kacem . Tombeau pour Guy Debord . . . . . Sandra Frimmel . Ich hasse die Avantgarde . . . . . Barbara Basting . Marinetti Detox . . . . . Zoran Terzić . Der Tautomane . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Après les avant-gardes . . . . . Soham Gupta . Angst . . . . . Raphaëlle Milone . Dachy Vivant . . . . . Zoran Terzić . The Tautomaniac . . . . . Jean-Luc Nancy . Nach den Avantgarden . . . . . Sandra Frimmel . I Hate the Avant-garde . . . . . Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers . What is the Meaning of the Avant-garde’s Death? . . . . . Mehdi Belhaj Kacem . Tomb for Guy Debord . . . . . Barbara Basting . Marinetti Detox . . . . . Mehdi Belhaj Kacem . Grabmal für Guy Debord . . . . . Soham Gupta . Angst . . . . . Raphaëlle Milone . Dachy Alive . . . . . Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers . Wofür steht der Tod der Avantgarden? . . . . . Soham Gupta . Angst
Web Magazine
He would say “Never work!”

Raphaëlle Milone

Old-school publisher, avant-garde dandy, undisputed expert on the global history of Dada: Raphaëlle Milone paints an intimate but unsparing portrait of a man who belonged perhaps to a dying breed but is still remembered vividly. ABO FR
Why should this be art?

Sandra Frimmel

What does it mean? ABO DE
How could Dante be avant-garde?

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

Like no other journal, Tel Quel was an outstanding arena of literary innovation and intellectual revolution. In this conversation its founder and publisher, Philippe Sollers, provides intimate insight and polemical hindsight into some of the most important milestones of its still-resonating era. ABO DE
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

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

On Gestational Communism

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

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

Surrogate Abolition

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

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

The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

Philology keeps it possible to open a space for the minority. OPEN
ACCESS FR

Donatien Grau

A Life in Philology

The Disobedience of the Word

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.” OPEN
ACCESS DE

Sina Dell’Anno

Punk / 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)

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
ACCESS

Dodie Bellamy

Plague Widow

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

Critique of generic rationality

The programs “sense” how the clients function, but not because AI is becoming more human—rather because clients now function as... OPEN
ACCESS DE

Zoran Terzić

The Grand Generalization

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

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?

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

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

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

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

DIAPHANES NO. 5
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 5

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

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
ACCESS DE

Andreas L. Hofbauer

Yoke

350 000 000 photographs onto Facebook everyday

The idea of making the world more open and connected has degenerated to a business concept. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

What we don’t see

Saturnaaaaalia

The rebellion of the signifiers against their semantic taming OPEN
ACCESS DE

Sina Dell’Anno

Oratio Soluta

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

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
ACCESS DE

A.K. Kaiza

An Annotated History of Wakanda

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

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

Symbolical transplants are necessary

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

Zoran Terzić

Political Transplants

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

DIAPHANES NO. 3
DIAPHANES MAGAZINE No. 3

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
ACCESS

Maël Renouard

The Twilight of Classi­fication?

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... OPEN
ACCESS

Elena Vogman

Dynamography, or Andrei Bely’s Rhythmic Gesture

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

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
ACCESS DE

Dietmar Dath

Your Sprache Never Was

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
ACCESS DE

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

Venice, Lagos, and the Spaces in between

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

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

Humanity is a metahuman concept.

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

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

On Realism

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

Reports from Fiction

Around 2007 I had the idea of making a feature film about a German woman who is kidnapped in Iraq.... ABO DE

Peter Ott

The Monotheistic Cell Or Reports from Fiction

ABT. DIE DUEMMSTEN BERLINER FRISÖRNAMEN

Liebhaarber Schnittstelle Schnittweise Haareszeit Friseur Pierette res capillorum Haarschneiderei über Kurz oder Lang Salon Stilkamm Wasser und Welle Ja-hairgroup - Timecutter Kommheim Haare schneiden Hairtrend-Vision Berlin HAIRLICH NATÜRLICH Kopfgeist Beate Kodat Frieseur Der Haarflüsterer® Berlin Methaarmorphosen haarjongleur Sylvia Scholz Ha(a)rmonie Haarstudio Abschnitt 22 Haar für Haar KopfKunst Friseur haargenau  & schnittig Haarstudio Mit-Schnitt Haareszeiten Flhair Kopfgeldjäger Zu den Schnittigen Haarstation (dabei das H gestaltet wie das H der Bushaltestellen) Kaiserschnitt Kamm 2 cut

Blixa Bargeld

LISTMANIA: ABT. DIE DUEMMSTEN BERLINER FRISÖRNAMEN

Self-portrait

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

Pierre Guyotat

Autoportrait

To lay a hand on the shoulder of ­future victims…

»By using voices I have rediscovered what we call humanity.« OPEN
ACCESS

Donatien Grau, Pierre Guyotat

Conversation

I remember

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

Je me souviens

 

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
  • 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…

  • 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!”

  • Future Pluperfect

    We are looking for relics of visions of the future in past image spaces, for the traces and signatures of something once imaginable and timelessly possible.

Magazine Special
When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker going slow

Soham Gupta

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 yet unseen ways.

ABO DE FR
Magazine Special
Guy Debord was the avant-garde’s Christ.

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

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 more unfettered since Debord’s death.

ABO FR 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