Bøker utgitt av Diaphanes

A theoretical exploration of possible ways out of concepts adopted by the Enlightenment. Thierry de Duve outlines the main features of a critical theory of male, all-too-male sexuation and cross-gender emancipation, drawing on Marcel Gauchet's theses on Christianity as an exit from religion, Jacques Lacan's algebra of desire, and Geneviève Morel's analysis of the "law of the mother." Wouldn't it have required more than the translation of the three Christian maxims "faith, hope, love" into the revolutionary maxims "liberté, egalité, fraternité?" Is there more to the knot of incarnation, fatherhood, and the cult of Mary than just Christian mysticism? Can the uncertainty of fatherhood become an act of faith that acknowledges a fundamental uncertainty? Come On, Men, One More Effort... explores ways out of the dead end of political concepts adopted by the Enlightenment and their continued impact today, since the only possibility seems to be to embrace the religious and reject it at the same time.

An edited collection of contributions to conversations about the climate crisis and its role in critical discourse. The climate change crisis has become part of aesthetic discourse and critical research in culture and the arts. Future-oriented, ecologically conceived possibilities for action are being explored by artists, curators, and scholars alike. eco-operations addresses these emerging aesthetic ecologies and new technologies of cooperation that both challenge and shape a sustainable future, foregrounding interruptions, ruptures, disconnections, dissonances, exclusions, and allochronism. Moving beyond the concepts of "flow" and "network" as a single, coherent (ecological or technological) system, eco-operations instead emphasizes the frictions within asynchronously running systems. The infrastructures and formats of artistic production and exhibition play a central role here, as they themselves constitute ecosystems that invite and regulate processes of sharing and exchange. Artists and activists are embedded in these ecosystems, in which they simultaneously intervene when searching for alternative ways of creating collaborative practice. Bringing together scholars, artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, eco-operations explores this field of tension between global and local ecologies and aims to speculate on where dissonances imply both creative potential and political challenges. eco-operations features contributions by Dalida María Benfield, Ursula Biemann, Lisa Blackmore, Mateo Chacón Pino, Lucrezia Cippitelli, T. J. Demos, Sandra Frimmel, Laura Flórez, Lorena Cely, Alexandra Gelis, Liliana Gómez, Fabienne Liptay, Uriel Orlow, and Dorota Sajewska.

A theory of passive vitalism. Contemporary theory has pushed the boundaries of the concept of the living, urging us to consider a vitality that manifests beyond the human, animal, or even the organic altogether. Recognizing the vast variety of modes of existence and vibrancy entails--such is the claim--a new ethics and politics. In Inorganic Life, the philosopher Eckardt Lindner intervenes in this discussion. He claims that we have not yet properly understood how and to what effect we can break the organo-centrism of philosophy and have neglected to consider the inner contradictions of such novel amalgams of vitalism and materialism. As an unlikely ally in his critical project, he investigates the inner tension in Deleuze's works between an overtly vitalist stance and critiques of classical forms of vitalism, bordering on a novel anti-vitalism. Against active forms of vitalism, interested in more immersion in the world, interconnectedness, and ever more efficacious praxis, one can find in Deleuze a passive vitalism. This subterranean thought in the philosophy of immanence highlights the capacity of life to disorient itself, to be out of line with itself, to detach itself from purposeful action and its own inner goals. Lindner explores this passive vitalism by drawing together thinkers such as Deleuze, Cioran, Laruelle, Kant, and Derrida. Suspicious of the moralistic and enthusiastic tendency of new materialisms, this vitalism would be inherently critical--even of its own commitments to liveliness--and thus gestures to a new politics and ethics of life.

An exploration of queerness in visual and material culture with regard to the specific conditions of the making and experience of art in different cultural, sociopolitical, and historical contexts. ambivalent work*s presents case studies, close- and against-the-grain readings of artworks across different media and geographies, conversations on the epistemological and methodological frameworks of a queerly-informed art history, and artistic contributions. Together they revisit central aspects such as visibility, failure, transgression, and subversion in recent art production while at the same time providing valuable links for transhistorical explorations. Making a case for polyvalence and simultaneity, ambivalent work*s demonstrates how intersectional approaches extend the examination of queer capacities in art and art history beyond issues related solely to sexuality and gender. Scholarly and artistic articulations equally push the boundaries of the academic field of art history while giving shape to an (im)possible project of a "queer art history." This book features contributions by Daniel Berndt, Jennifer Doyle, Aleksandra Gajowy, David J. Getsy, Susanne Huber, Katrin Köppert, Christian Liclair, Renate Lorenz, Fiona McGovern, Diyi Mergenthaler, Lucas Odahara, Rena Onat, Barbara Paul, and Ashkan Sepahvand.

An artistic study of the Wendezeit in East Germany. The focus of this narrative-analytical text-photo-montage is the so-called Wendezeit in East Germany, the years after the reunification, and the individual and collective outbreaks of violence that accompanied this radical change. Based on personal experiences and trained on literary and theoretical works such as Alexander Kluge's Case Histories, Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies, and W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz, Kai Ziegner reflects on remembrance and testimony in a way that is as critical as it is experimental. Where and how do authoritarian regimes and structures persist across generations? What scars can be read on the fault lines of disruptive processes and how to deal with--not only historical--situations in which the protagonists are victims and perpetrators at the same time? Ziegner's artistic research shows how the unpresentable can become visible, how the ambiguous can be told, and how a differentiated processing can be made possible.

Antonin Artaud's last large-scale work, published in its complete form in English for the first time. Drawings on texts and letters dating from 1946, some of them written while he was still confined at the Rodez psychiatric hospital, Artaud devoted the months of November 1946 to February 1947 to completing his book through a long series of vocal improvisations titled Interjections, dictated at his pavilion on the edge of Paris. He cursed the assassins he believed were on their way there to steal his semen, to make his brain go "up in smoke as under the action of one of those machines created to suck up filth from the floor," and finally to erase him. The publisher who had commissioned the book, Louis Broder, was horrified at reading its incandescent, fiercely obscene, and anti-religious manuscript and refused to publish it. Ambitious and experimental in scale, fragmentary and ferocious in intent, it was not published until 1978, in an edition prepared by Artaud's close friend Paule Thévenin. Artaud commented that it was an "impossible" book, and that "nobody has ever read it from end to end, not even its own author." Clayton Eshleman, together with his translation collaborators such as David Rattray, began work soon after 1978 on an English-language edition, with extracts appearing especially in Eshleman's poetry magazine, Sulfur. But they, too, were unable to take forward the publication of the book. This volume presents it in its complete form in English for the first time.

A French-language edition of a book focused on avant-garde art and art criticism in Spain during Francoism.

Dans l'entre-deux-guerres à Paris, au moment où une frange d'intellectuels unit ses voix aux mouvements nationalistes, des critiques d'art gravitant autour de l'École de Paris prennent des positions esthétiques et idéologiques parfois déroutantes. L'ouvrage examine les motivations personnelles, communautaires et sociales des diverses plumes qui ont débattu la question d'un « art juif » et de son éventuel caractère « ethnique ». Il étoffe notre compréhension de la politisation des discours sur l'art, sans céder à une vision simplificatrice ou binaire : à l'heure de la montée des fascismes, certains critiques d'art se sont adaptés aux circonstances, reflétant les glissements et les instabilités de l'époque.