front cover of I Was More American than the Americans
I Was More American than the Americans
Sylvère Lotringer in Conversation with Donatien Grau
Sylvère Lotringer and Donatien Grau
Diaphanes, 2021
A personal take on French Theory by one of the people who invented it.

In the mid-1970s, Sylvère Lotringer created Semiotext(e), a philosophical group that became a magazine and then a publishing house. Since its creation, Semio-text(e) has been a place of stimulating dialogue between artists and philosophers, and for the past fifty years, much of American artistic and intellectual life has depended on it. The model of the journal and the publishing house revolves around the notion of the collective, and Lotringer has rarely shared his personal journey: his existence as a hidden child during World War II; the liberating and then traumatic experience of the collective in the kibbutz; his Parisian activism in the 1960s; his time of wandering, that took him, by way of Istanbul, to the United States; and then, of course, his American years, the way he mingled his nightlife with the formal experimentation he invented with Semiotext(e) and with his classes. Since the early 2010s, Donatien Grau has developed the habit of visiting Lotringer during his trips to Los Angeles; some of their dialogs were published or held in public. This book is an entry into Lotringer's life, his friendships, his choices, and his admiration for some of the leading thinkers of our times. The conversations between Lotringer and Grau show bursts of life, traces of a journey, through texts and existence itself, with an unusual intensity.
 
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Idiocracy
The Culture of the New Idiot
Zoran Terzic
Diaphanes, 2021
There is a new quality of idiocy today. While the old idiot derived knowledge from isolation, the new idiot refuses all understanding of the world. A figure of systematic incompetence, the new idiot is impacting global culture and politics alike, giving rise to surprising, often absurd competences. Yesterday’s “fake news” or “post-truths” can be read today as evidence of an ongoing transformation of self-politics in which the idiotic impulse is redefining our experience of the world. Despite talk of global awareness, the isolated self of the many is all the more effective. It brings about a culture of happy singletons strolling towards a black hole that has become their substitute for society.

Zoran ​Terzić’s wide-ranging essay takes up the figure of the idiot and follows its numerous appearances throughout intellectual history in an examination of the “art of the idiotic” that both reflects and transcends the freneticism of the present.
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front cover of Infinitely Determinable
Infinitely Determinable
Children and Childhood in Modern Literature
Davide Giuriato
Diaphanes, 2021
Upon the “discovery of childhood,” as named by Philippe Ariès, bourgeois culture and modern literature marked out an arcane realm that, while scarcely accessible for adults, acted as a space for projections of the most contradictory kind and diverse ideological purposes: childhood. As this book reveals, from the eighteenth century onwards, the child increasingly came into focus in literature as a mysterious creature. Now the child seems a strange being, constantly unsettling and alienating, although exposed to ongoing territorialization. This is possible because the space of ‘childhood’ is essentially blank and indefinite. Modernity, therefore, has discovered it as a zone, in the words of Friedrich Schiller of “boundless determinability."
 
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Inorganic Life
On Post-Vitalism
Eckardt Lindner
Diaphanes, 2024
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.
 
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front cover of Invented Skins
Invented Skins
Epidermal Readings in Brazilian Art and Literature
Eduardo Jorge De Oliveira
Diaphanes, 2023
A wide-ranging exploration of skin in text, images, and cultural memory.
 
Skin is unique to each individual. Acting as a record, it details aspects of a person and a collective memory. Each skin possesses a sensitivity that touches and it is touched by the world. It mediates temperature fluctuations and is marked by cuts, accidents, and its own history. Skin marks us in the world, giving us the outline of individuals. Invented Skins focuses on the skin to consider the social dimension of texts and images throughout cultural memory, showing that skin is a biological reality that occupies a physical and psychic space but also unfolds in the imagination.
 
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Inventory and Hinge
Entangled Fields of Research in the Arts. Institute for Contemporary Art Research 2001–2022
Edited by Christoph Schenker
Diaphanes, 2023
A history of the pioneering years establishing a new genre in the field of arts: artistic research.

Artistic work connects multiple competencies, areas of knowledge, and ways of life. The Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR) has made this principle its guiding ethos through organizing research projects in correspondence with this transgressive gesture, manifesting as interdisciplinary, networked knowledge production.

Inventory and Hinge offers an overview of the research projects performed over the last two decades at IFCAR through project descriptions, plentiful illustrations, and, most importantly, links and QR codes that grant access to nearly all publications and websites that were created by the individual projects he discusses.

Although art as research has a long tradition outside of institutions, Inventory and Hinge chronicles IFCAR’s drive to introduce this new discipline and establish a new artistic genre.
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front cover of Itérations
Itérations
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Diaphanes, 2013
Sous ce titre qui rend hommage à la pensée de Derrida, sont rassemblées des conférences tenues par le biologiste Hans-Jörg Rheinberger entre 1994 et 2007. Six textes aussi brefs que denses, nourris de vie de laboratoire et de philosophie franco-allemande – de Gaston Bachelard à Bruno Latour en passant par Martin Heidegger et Jacques Lacan –, qui donnent à voir un mouvement épistémologique sur le temps long. Tentant de faire dialoguer cet héritage philosophique avec la biologie moléculaire contemporaine, Itérations propose des variations sur l'inconnu et l'insoupçonné dans la recherche scientifique, et sur les systèmes expérimentaux comme contextes déterminants de la production des savoirs – cernant toujours les manifestations de l'Être comme écriture.
Excellente introduction à cette pensée de l'épistémologie historique, Itérations est l’un des prolongements les plus féconds de la pensée de Derrida.
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