Diaphanes

Diaphanes has been active as a publisher since 2001, with its headquarters in Zurich and a project space in Berlin. Editorial care and sophisticated design are the main coordinates of a multilingual book production oriented to enduring relevance in the interconnection of discourse and fiction, art and the humanities, literature and philosophy. As open to the new as to the forgotten, Diaphanes wishes to offer a lively place of publication outside the dominant mainstream, and to give productive resonance to a wide variety of forms of knowledge and expression. With a classical print production and an innovative online palette, Diaphanes addresses an open and critical reading public, for whom books remain an indispensable tool of intellectual interchange. An available backlist of over 500 titles in German, English, and French, together with an annual program of around 50 new publications in worldwide distribution, make Diaphanes one of the most prominent independent publishers.

Diaphanes is also, since 2017, the name of a quarterly English-, German-, multi-language magazine with a focus on contemporary art, critical discourse, and multilingual fiction.
 
Zurich / Berlin
 
165 titles
Series:
 
 Claire Fontaine - La grève humaine - Et l\'art de créer la liberté
2020
French edition
An anthology of Claire Fontaine's texts.
Jean-Luc Nancy - Immortelle finitude - Sexualité et philosophie
2020
French edition
Two thinkers of different generations discuss the question of sexuality and philosophy.
Mehdi Belhaj Kacem - Système du pléonectique
2020
French edition
The pleonectic comes from a neologism that means: have-more. The challenge of this major book by Mehdi Belhaj Kacem is to identify the ontological principle from which to question the afflictions in which our world is struggling.
Hannes Rickli - Natures of Data - A Discussion between Biology, History and Philosophy of Science and Art
2020
English edition
A transdisciplinary discussion on the influence of computer-based technologies on the conditions of biological research.
Jörg Wiesel - Manifesto of Artistic Research
2020
bilingual edition (English / German)
A manifesto for artistic research and in defense of its autonomy.
Diaphanes - Authenticity and Feedback
2019
texts in English and French
Diaphanes #8/9 looks into curious loops of reproduced present, the integral of circular I-effects, the other side of the social Möbius strip. Is the self nothing but an echo? An effect without cause? The human being a message, an autoreply in the jargon of social-memes? Who or what massages the backchannel so astoundingly self-similarly, like an invisible hand?
After the Crisis - Contemporary States of Photography
2019
English edition
A platform for discussions between some of today's leading artists, writers, theorists, curators, and historians aimed at questioning the very status of photography today.
Après la crise - États contemporains de la photographie
2019
French edition
A platform for discussions between some of today's leading artists, writers, theorists, curators, and historians aimed at questioning the very status of photography today.
Alexander García Düttmann - Qu\'est-ce que l\'art contemporain ?
2019
French edition
The heart of the political-aesthetic debate.
Alenka Zupančič - Qu\'est-ce que le sexe ?
2019
French edition
Sexuality as a properly philosophical problem of psychoanalysis.
Aesthetic Theory
2019
English edition
There is no theory that is not aesthetic (collective publication edited by Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse and Sandro Zanetti).
Dorota Sajewska - Necroperformance - Cultural Reconstructions of the War Body
2019
English edition
Dorata Sajewska proposes an innovative perspective for looking back at the formative process of Polish modernity, delving into repressed areas of experience connected with World War I and the ensuing emancipatory movements.
Elena Vogman - Dance of Values - Sergei Eisenstein\'s Capital Project
2019
English edition
Researcher Elena Vogman examines the unpublished archival material relating to the film adaptation of Karl Marx's Capital by Sergei Eisenstein. The analysis of these materials reveals the clear and ambitious idea that animated the Soviet filmmaker for this aborted project: to build a visual theorization of value.
Angelika Meier - File en douce, oublie-moi
2019
French edition
The French translation of the second novel of the German writer.
Diaphanes - Specters of the Avant-Garde
2019
texts in English and French
Diaphanes is conjuring the ghosts of the avant-garde for its Summer 2019 double issue, including a 80-page insert with 155 photos by Antoine d'Agata and an essay by Mehdi Belhaj Kacem.
Between / Beyond / Hybrid - New Essays on Transdisciplinarity
2019
English edition
Prominent voices of the debate on transdisciplinarity in a transdisciplinary manner.
Reiner Schürmann - Tomorrow the Manifold - Essays on Foucault, Anarchy, and the Singularization to Come
2019
English edition
This collection assembles key essays of Reiner Schürmann centering on the concepts of anarchy and the singularization to come. Setting out from the question of the status of practical philosophy at the end of metaphysics, these texts track the crucial role of Schürmann's engagement with the work of Michel Foucault between 1983 and 1991.
Stephen Barber - Film\'s Ghosts - Tatsumi Hijikata\'s Butoh and the Transmutation of 1960s Japan
2019
English edition
An essential book for readers engaged with film and performance, urban cultures and architecture, and Japan's experimental art and its histories.
Emmanuel Levinas - On Obliteration
2019
English edition
One of Levinas' rare statements focusing on the fine arts.
Antonin Artaud - Artaud 1937 Apocalypse - Letters from Ireland
2019
English edition
First English translation of Antonin Artaud's writings from his apocalyptic journey to Ireland in 1937.
 Line Faden-Babin & Jakob Rachmanski - Kierkegaard and the Mermaid
2019
English edition
Once upon a time, in a coral palace at the bottom of the sea, hidden from human eyes, there lived a princess with a fish's tail. Her parents adored her, and she was engaged to the most tender and beautiful of all the mermen, and she could have been the happiest of all the mermaids. But the little princess was desperately unhappy… (an illustrated philosophy book for children).
Diaphanes - Taming the Gaze
2018
bilingual edition (English / German)
This issue turns its attention to deception and censorship, violence and consumption, enjoyment and norm, to the techniques of taming and the economies of morality; it measures the distance between art and non-art, follows the beast of freedom in the aporias of form, searches out lucid angles of wild reflection, moments of anarchic seeing, new means of emancipation.
Peter Kurzeck - Un hiver de neige
2018
French edition
The first volume of Peter Kurzeck's great autobiographical and poetic chronicle in 12 volumes: the opening of a colossal literary project which portrays the city of Frankfurt and Germany in the early 1980s. A must read, often compared to Proust, Joyce, and Döblin.
Stephen Barber - White Noise Ballrooms
2018
English edition
In a corrupt town of North England shortly before Thatcher, a group of kids sets a “white noise” insurgency to try and save the city. A disturbing and captivating novel.
Neolithic Childhood - Art in a False Present, c. 1930
2018
English edition
Based on the writings of Carl Einstein, this comprehensive, richly illustrated reader examines how the artistic avant-gardes reacted to the multiple crises of European modernity around 1930. Structured around a glossary, the publication gathers commissioned essays, texts by Einstein, and documentation on the namesake exhibition.
Mike Wilson - Rockabilly
2018
English edition
After a meteorite crashes into his yard, the daily life of Rockabilly and of his neighbors takes a strange turn… Mike Wilson's third novel combines social criticism and science fiction, depicting the dark corners of American suburbs at night.
Sebastian Egenhofer - Towards an Aesthetics of Production
2018
English edition
Throughout the twentieth century, critical art history often chose to ally itself with a restrictive brand of formalism. Therefore, critical analyses regularly reduced the artwork to its material and its social use. Based on this observation, historian Sebastian Egenhofer takes Deleuze's readings of philosophers as a starting point to renew the narrative of art history since the 1960s.
Yan Marchand - Martin Heidegger\'s Grouch
2018
English edition
Questioning the meaning of one's existence with Martin Heidegger (an illustrated philosophy book for children).
Jérôme Meyer-Bisch - Lao-Tzu - Or the Way of the Dragon
2018
English edition
To find the way of Wisdom with Lao-Tzu (an illustrated philosophy book for children).
Diaphanes - Merry Xenotism!
2018
bilingual edition (English / German)
Under the title of Merry Xenotism!, Diaphanes #4 directs its attention to everything foreign and different, to the other in the same and the same in the other. With contributions from art, literature, and discourse by Leonard Suryajaya, Slavs & Tartars, Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Yves Netzhammer, Jean-Luc Nancy, Tianzhuo Chen, Elena Dorfman, Maria Gabriela Llansol, A.K. Kaiza, Miguel Tamen, Lina Atfah, Michele Pedrazzi, Angelika Meier, Joseph Morder, Jordan Lee Schnee, Jochen Thermann, and many others.
Scripted Culture - Digitalization and the Cultural Public Sphere
2018
English edition
The cultural public sphere at the digital age.
The Present of the Future
2018
English edition
(last copies available!)
This publication investigates our present relation to the future and asks which means and strategies artists and scholars pursue today, to gain a new scope of action for shaping alternative futures. It brings together contributions by academic staff at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich as well as selected artistic work by students.
Diaphanes - Time Probe Zero Synthesis
2018
bilingual edition (English / German)
In its third edition, Diaphanes probes the (im)possibilities of coming to visual and conceptual grips with the present, and brings together artistic, literary, and critical positions and perspectives on imperative contemporaneity and absolute nowness (with Manuel Franquelo, Dietmar Dath, Nicole Bachmann, Maël Renouard, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Gilles Rotzetter, Alexander Kluge, Lucy McKenzie, Markus Proschek, Philip Topolovac, Ko Murobushi, Stephen Barber, Elena Vogman, Marcus Quent, Wolfgang Plöger, Jso Maeder, Luc Meresma, Dieter Mersch, Penelope Umbrico, Christine Tauber).
Christian Marazzi - Le socialisme du capital
2017
French edition
The socialism of Capital: a collection of texts by economist Christian Marazzi on the new capitalist regime formed out of the 2008 crisis.
Nikolai Evreinov - The Storming of the Winter Palace
2017
English edition
A collective study on the theatrical reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace by Soviet dramatist Nikolai Evreinov, on the occasion of the October Revolution's third anniversary. This staging of the beginning of the revolution, performed by 10.000 people, is documented thanks to an ensemble of texts, photographs, and drawings.
Epidemic Subjects - Radical Ontology
2017
English edition
Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the “girl,” this series of essays brings together a team of contributors to forge a radically inclusive definition of subjectivity in modern philosophy.
Claus Pias - Computer Game Worlds
2017
English edition
Why do computer games exist? A historical and epistemological study of the computer game.
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