front cover of Nationalismes, antisémitismes et débats autour de l’art juif
Nationalismes, antisémitismes et débats autour de l’art juif
De quelques critiques d’art au temps de l’École de Paris (1925–1933)
Alessandro Gallicchio
Diaphanes, 2023
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.
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Natura
Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape
Edited by Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, and Dayron Carrillo Morell
Diaphanes, 2018
For poets, artists, philosophers, and even environmental activists and historians, the landscape has long constituted a surface onto which to project visions of utopia beyond modernity and capitalism. Yet amid fracking, deep sea drilling, biopiracy, and all the other environmental ravages of late capitalism, we are brought to re-examine the terms of landscape formations. In what ways might artistic, scholarly, and scientific work on nature push our thinking past seeing the world as something we act on, and instead give agency to the landscape itself?

Natura takes up this challenge, exploring how recent activist practices and eco-artistic turns in Latin America can help us to reconfigure the categories of nature and the human. Moving from botanical explorations of early modernity, through the legacies of mid-twentieth-century landscape design, up to present struggles for the rights of nature and speculative post-human creations, the critical essays and visual contributions in this anthology use interdisciplinary encounters to reimagine the landscape and how we inhabit it.
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Natures of Data
A Discussion between Biologists, Artists and Science Scholars
Philipp Fischer, Gabriele Gramelsberger, Christoph Hoffmann, Hans Hofmann, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, and Hannes Rickli
Diaphanes, 2020
Computer-based technologies for the production and analysis of data have been an integral part of biological research since the 1990s at the latest. This not only applies to genomics and its offshoots but also to less conspicuous subsections such as ecology. But little consideration has been given to how this new technology has changed research practically. How and when do data become questionable? To what extent does necessary infrastructure influence the research process? What status is given to software and algorithms in the production and analysis of data? These questions are discussed by the biologists Philipp Fischer and Hans Hofmann, the philosopher Gabriele Gramelsberger, the historian of science and biology Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, the science theorist Christoph Hoffmann, and the artist Hannes Rickli. The conditions of experimentation in the digital sphere are examined in four chapters—“Data,” “Software,” “Infrastructure,” and “in silico”—in which the different perspectives of the discussion partners complement one another. Rather than confirming any particular point of view, Natures of Data deepens understanding of the contemporary basis of biological research.
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Necroperformance
Cultural Reconstructions of the War Body
Dorota Sajewska
Diaphanes, 2019
 In Necroperformance, 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. Underpinning modern Polish nationhood, she reveals, is not only a Romantic myth of independence but also the up-close horrors of fratricidal warfare and the pacifist aspirations of those confronted with its violence.

Searching for traces of memory in precarious bodies inflicted with the violence of war, Necroperformance implores us to acknowledge the fragility of life as it actively reinforces an attitude of respect for the right to live. Sajewska constructs here an alternative culture archive, conjuring it from compoundly-mediatized historical remnants—bodies, documents, artworks, and cultural writings—that demand to be recognized in non-canonical reflection on our past. Her chief objective is to understand the social impact of remains and their place in culture, and by examining the body and corporality in artistic practices, social and cultural performances, she strives to identify both the fragmentariness of memory and the discontinuity of history, and finally, to reinstate the body’s (or its documental remains’) historical and political dimension.
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Neighborhood Technologies
Media and Mathematics of Dynamic Networks
Edited by Tobias Harks and Sebastian Vehlken
Diaphanes, 2015
Neighborhood Technologies expands upon sociologist Thomas Schelling’s well-known study of segregation in major American cities, using this classic work as the basis for a new way of researching social networks across many different disciplines. Up to now, research has focused on macro-level behaviors that, together, form rigid systems of neighborhood relations. But can neighborhoods conversely affect larger, global dynamics? What relationships can be found between micro- and macro- perspectives?

To answer these and related questions, this volume introduces the concept of “neighborhood technologies” as a model for intermediate, or meso-level, research into the links between local agents and neighborhood relations. Bridging the gap between the sciences and humanities, Tobias Harks and Sebastian Vehlken have assembled a group of contributors who are either natural scientists with an interest in interdisciplinary research or technology-savvy humanists. With insights into computer science, mathematics, sociology, media and cultural studies, theater studies, and architecture, the book will inform new research.
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Neo-Aristotelianism and the Medieval Renaissance
On Aquinas, Ockham, and Eckhart
Reiner Schürmann
Diaphanes, 2020
In this lecture course, Reiner Schürmann develops the idea that, in between the spiritual Carolingian Renaissance and the secular humanist Renaissance, there was a distinctive medieval Renaissance connected with the rediscovery of Aristotle. Focusing on Thomas Aquinas’s ontology and epistemology, William of Ockham’s conceptualism, and Meister Eckhart’s speculative mysticism, Schürmann shows how thought began to break free from religion and the hierarchies of the feudal, neo-Platonic order and devote its attention to otherness and singularity. A crucial supplement to Schürmann’s magnum opus Broken Hegemonies, Neo-Aristotelianism and the Medieval Renaissance will be essential reading for anyone interested in the rise and fall of Western principles, and thus in how to think and act today.
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Neolithic Childhood
Art in a False Present, c. 1930
Edited by Anselm Franke and Tom Holert
Diaphanes, 2018

Resonating at the heart of Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 is the question whether art has present, past, and future functions. The modernist assertion of the autonomy of art was intended to render superfluous art’s social and religious functions. But what if the functionlessness of art comes under suspicion of being instrumentalized by bourgeois capitalism? This was an accusation that informed the anti-modernist critique of the avant-garde, and particularly of Surrealism. The objective throughout the crisis-ridden present of the 1920s to the 1940s was to reaffirm a once ubiquitous, but long-lost functionality—not only of art.

The publication accompanying the exhibition examines the strategies deployed in this reaffirmation. These include the surrealist Primitivism of an “Ethnology of the White Man” together with the excavation of the deep time of humanity—into the “Neolithic Childhood” mapped out by the notoriously anti-modernist Carl Einstein (1885-1940) as a hallucinatory retro-utopia. The volume brings together essays by the curators and academics involved in the project, primary texts by Carl Einstein and a comprehensive documentation of the exhibition including lists of works, texts on as well as images of numerous exhibits and finally installation views. At the center of the volume, a glossary discusses Carl Einstein’s own theoretical vocabulary as well as further associated terms, such as Autonomy, Formalism, Function, Gesture, Hallucination, Art, Metamorphosis, Primitivisms, Totality.

With contributions by: Irene Albers, Philipp Albers, Joyce S. Cheng, Rosa Eidelpes, Carl Einstein, Anselm Franke, Charles W. Haxthausen, Tom Holert, Sven Lütticken, Ulrike Müller, Jenny Nachtigall, David Quigley, Cornelius Reiber, Erhard Schüttpelz, Kerstin Stakemeier, Maria Stavrinaki, Elena Vogman, Zairong Xiang, Sebastian Zeidler

With reproductions of artworks by:
Jean (Hans) Arp, Willi Baumeister, Georges Braque, Brassaï, Claude Cahun, Lux T. Feininger, Max Ernst, Florence Henri, Barbara Hepworth, Hannah Höch, Heinrich Hoerle, Paul Klee, Germaine Krull, Helen Levitt, André Masson, Alexandra Povòrina, Gaston-Louis Roux, Kalifala Sidibé, Louis Soutter, Yves Tanguy, Toyen, Jindřich Štyrský, Raoul Ubac, Paule Vézelay and others.

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Nikolai Evreinov & Others
»The Storming of the Winter Palace«
Edited by Inke Arns, Sylvia Sasse, and Igor Chubarov
Diaphanes, 2017
In 1920, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, dramatist Nikolai Evreinov directed a cast of 10,000 actors, dancers, and circus performers—as well as a convoy of armored cars and tanks—in The Storming of the Winter Palace. The mass spectacle, presented in and around the real Winter Palace in Petrograd, was intended to recall the storming as the beginning of the October Revolution. But it was a deceptive reenactment because, in producing the events it sought to reenact, it created a new kind of theater, agit-drama, promulgating political propaganda and deliberately breaking down the distinction between performers and spectators.

Nikolaj Evreinov: “The Storming of the Winter Palace” tells the fascinating story of this production. Taking readers through the relevant history, the authors describe the role of The Storming of the Winter Palace in commemorating Soviet power. With a wealth of illustrations, they also show how photographs of Evreinov’s theatrical storming eventually became historical documents of the October Revolution themselves.
 
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front cover of NO Rhetoric(s)
NO Rhetoric(s)
Versions and Subversions of Resistance in Contemporary Global Art
Edited by Sara Alonso Gómez, Isabel J. Piniella Grillet, Nadia Radwan, and Elena Rosauro
Diaphanes, 2021
An incisive examination of the intersection of global art and political resistance.

NO Rhetoric(s) examines a subject intensely debated during the last three decades but rarely a topic of its own: art as an agent of resistance, whether as a rhetorical stance or critical strategy. In the face of today’s discourse on revolt and insurrection, it is necessary to ask whether the gesture of “negation” still has an emancipatory potential. NO Rhetoric(s) contributes a deeper understanding of the different logics of resistance at play between art and politics. Showcasing a diverse array of voices, this volume presents contributions on topics as varied as sexual dissidence, ecology, and geopolitics in the digital age. Through this interdisciplinary show of force, the collected authors, artists, and scholars shed light on how art approaches the most urgent issues facing today’s society.
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Non-Construction
An Architectural Gesture in Artistic Research
Ronny Hardliz
Diaphanes, 2021
By defining a concept of architecture based on the tactile experience and not on construction, this book allows us to explore both discursive practice as the study of architectural art and the integration of architectural art as a discourse of spatial practice. In order to take on this new lens, Non-Construction utilizes a cinematographic documentary image strategy that engages with a critical spatial exploration of current entanglements of art and research at the crossroads of art, theory, and architecture. A challenge to visual conventions, this book offers conceptual and aesthetic insights into spiraling and voiding sensual experiences, with implications for the decolonization of the documentary and cinematographic reaching far beyond architecture.
 
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