front cover of Watchfiends and Rack Screams
Watchfiends and Rack Screams
Artaud’s Last Unpublished Work
Antonin Artaud
Diaphanes, 2024
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.
 
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front cover of Ways of Releasement
Ways of Releasement
Writings on God, Eckhart, and Zen
Reiner Schürmann
Diaphanes, 2023
Never-before-published writing from a key twentieth-century philosopher.
 
In 1962, Reiner Schürmann began studying at the Dominican school of theology Le Saulchoir, outside Paris. That experience radically shaped his life and work, enabling him to begin to develop many of the ideas for which he would later be known: letting be, life without why, ontological anarchy, and the tragic double bind.
 
Ways of Releasement contains never-before-published material from Schürmann’s early period as well as a report Schürmann wrote about his encounter with Heidegger; a précis of his autobiographical novel, Origins; and translations and new editions of later groundbreaking essays. Ways of Releasement concludes with an extensive afterword setting Schürmann’s writings in the context of his thinking and life.
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front cover of What is Contemporary Art?
What is Contemporary Art?
Alexander García Düttmann
Diaphanes, 2019
Art today is often practiced in perfect conformity with the neoliberal zeitgeist, often even denying its own radical potential. What is Contemporary Art? lucidly examines the relationship between art and politics in our time. Addressing the heart of the political-aesthetic debate, Alexander Garcia Düttmann shows how the radicality of contemporary art actually serves to strengthen today’s political ideologies, ultimately frustrating rather than propelling real social change as a result.
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front cover of What’s Legit?
What’s Legit?
Critiques of Law and Strategies of Rights
Edited by Liza Mattutat, Roberto Nigro, Nadine Schiel, and Heiko Stubenrauch
Diaphanes, 2020
Once considered a stepchild of social theory, legal criticism has recently received a great deal of attention, perpetuating what has always been an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand, law is praised for being a cultural achievement, on the other, it is criticized for being an instrument of state oppression. Legal criticism’s strategies to deal with this ambivalence differ greatly. While some seek to transcend the institution of law altogether, others advocate a transformation of the form of law or try to employ strategies to change the content of law, deconstruct its basis, or invent rights. By presenting a variety of approaches to legal criticism, What’s Legit? highlights transitions and exhibits irreconcilable differences of these approaches. Ultimately, What’s Legit? broadens debates that are all too often conducted only within the boundaries of separate theoretical currents.
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front cover of Wittgenstein's Rhinoceros
Wittgenstein's Rhinoceros
Françoise Armengaud
Diaphanes, 2016
At its most basic, philosophy is about learning how to think about the world around us. It should come as no surprise, then, that children make excellent philosophers! Naturally inquisitive, pint-size scholars need little prompting before being willing to consider life’s “big questions,” however strange or impractical. Plato & Co. introduces children—and curious grown-ups—to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Descartes to Socrates, Einstein, Marx, and Wittgenstein. Each book in the series features an engaging—and often funny—story that presents basic tenets of philosophical thought alongside vibrant color illustrations.

“Mister Wittgenstein! Stop looking for a horned beast in the middle of a Cambridge classroom!,” an exasperated Bertrand Russell commands his pupil. But the young Ludwig Wittgenstein knows that, just because we don’t see a rhinoceros, doesn’t mean one may not be hiding where we least expect it. When war breaks out in Europe, Ludwig is recruited for a top-secret mission. Alas, no one is able to make sense of rhino-loving philosopher’s notebooks. What could he possibly mean by so many seemingly nonsensical statements?

            Plato & Co.’s clear approach and charming illustrations make this series the perfect addition to any little library.
 
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