Browse by Author
59 scholarly books by Diaphanes
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Timing of Affect: Epistemologies of Affection
Marie-Luise Angerer
Diaphanes, 2014
Affect, or the process by which emotions come to be embodied, is a burgeoning area of interest in both the humanities and the sciences. For Timing of Affect, Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bösel, and Michaela Ott have assembled leading scholars to explore the temporal aspects of affect through the perspectives of philosophy, music, film, media, and art, as well as technology and neurology. The contributions address possibilities for affect as a capacity of the body; as an anthropological inscription and a primary, ontological conjunctive and disjunctive processes; as an interruption of chains of stimulus and response; and as an arena within cultural history for political, media, and psychopharmacological interventions. Showing how these and other temporal aspects of affect are articulated both throughout history and in contemporary society, the editors then explore the implications for the current knowledge structures surrounding affect today.
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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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Nikolai Evreinov & Others: »The Storming of the Winter Palace«
Inke Arns
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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Egocracy: Marx, Freud and Lacan
Sonia Arribas
Diaphanes, 2011
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Dépossession
Athena Athanasio
Diaphanes, 2016
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Social Media-New Masses
Inge Baxmann
Diaphanes, 2016
Mass gatherings are at the center of contemporary discussions about community formation, communication, and social control. As new digital technologies and social media platforms have emerged, the concept of the mass gathering has evolved in parallel to take account of the different ways masses and crowds may form, including digital masses like flash mobs and protest groups. At the same time, these new digital masses provide a remarkable opportunity to reevaluate the broader historiographical framework surrounding mass gatherings.
With Social Media—New Masses, Inge Baxmann, Timon Beyes, and Claus Pias have brought together a diverse group of sociologists, media and cultural studies theorists, and historians of knowledge and technology who, together, outline the contours of this expanding field of research and analyze the differences between the old and new conceptions of masses and the distinct conditions and political consequences for each. Contributors to the volume include Marie-Luise Angerer, Dirk Baecker, Christian Borch, Christoph Engemann, Charles Ess, Wolfgang Hagen, Peter Krapp, Mirko Tobias Schäfer, and Sebastian Vehlken.
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Mad Men, Death and the American Dream
Elisabeth Bronfen
Diaphanes, 2016
Library of Congress PN1992.77.M226B76 2016
Matthew Weiner’s Emmy-winning series Mad Men has earned wide critical acclaim in its seven seasons. What is it about these impeccably dressed men and women of midcentury Madison Avenue that fascinates us? Decades later, when Weiner’s iconic characters seem as much a thing of the past as the workday martini, why is it so easy for modern viewers to commiserate with the reserved but ambitious Peggy Olson, to jeer at Pete Campbell, and to cheer on Don Draper in his often indecorous struggles?
We are drawn to Mad Men’s dapper cast of characters, argues Elisabeth Bronfen, because, although the series has drawn praise for its depiction of the 1960s and ’70s, it speaks equally well to cultural concerns of the present. The prototypical con man, Don makes a precarious journey from poverty to fame and prosperity that maps the pursuit of moral perfectionism that features prominently throughout American cultural history. Yet a lingering sense of dissatisfaction hints that the lifestyle Don strives for may be a mere manifestation of the illusory American dream—cemented in the same collective desires Don draws on to advertise cigarettes and luxury cars by day.
"Mad Men," Death and the American Dream takes readers through the cultural fantasies that underlie characters’ motivations in this sophisticated and immensely popular television series, showing how—then as now—we turn to fantasy in the face of conflicts that cannot be resolved in political reality. Fascinating and full of accessible insights, the book will appeal to the show’s many fans, as well as anyone interested in American studies, media studies, or cultural history.
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L’étrange survie du néolibéralisme
Colin Crouch
Diaphanes, 2016
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Post-démocratie
Colin Crouch
Diaphanes, 2013
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Multiples in Pre-Modern Art
Walter Cupperi
Diaphanes, 2014
Library of Congress N8580.M858 2014
In the art world, replicas are typically thought to be of low value. However skillfully created, they remain in the eyes of many mere copies, pointing toward an original of greater significance. In recent years, however, replicas and multiples have come to occupy a more central position in discussions about ancient, medieval, and early modern art.
Multiples in Pre-Modern Art looks at the production and reception of replicas and multiples before the nineteenth century. A wide variety of media are considered, including metal, marble, terra cotta, textiles, plaster, porcelain, canvas, wood, and wax. Through a series of questions—What happens if a copy purposely points not to an original but to another copy? What does it matter that some serially made multiples are not identical?—many of the works are reappraised as significant art forms in their own right.
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El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics
Clémentine Deliss
Diaphanes, 2015
El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics offers the first art-historical survey on the multidimensional work of Senegalese artist, curator, and cultural activist El Hadji Sy. Spanning thirty years of his practice as a painter, performance artist, and founder of numerous artists’ collectives and workshops in Dakar (Laboratoire AGIT’ART, Tenq, and Village des Arts), it provides unprecedented insight into the conceptual and aesthetic framework of a major living artist and curator from West Africa.
With newly commissioned essays and interviews by Hans Belting, Clémentine Deliss, Mamadou Diouf, Julia Grosse, Yvette Mutumba, Philippe Pirotte, and Manon Schwich, the book is presented in a bilingual English-German edition and also contains unique archival material, including manifestos, documents, and over four hundred illustrations.
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Foreign Exchange: (Or the Stories You Wouldn't Tell a Stranger)
Clémentine Deliss
Diaphanes, 2014
Founded in 1904, Frankfurt’s Weltkulturen Museum houses a remarkable collection of ethnographic artifacts from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, with the aims of advancing public education and fostering innovative anthropological research across a wide variety of contemporary artistic practices.
Developed through artistic research in the Weltkulturen Museum’s Weltkulturen Labor research lab, Foreign Exchange raises questions about the relationship between the museum’s educational and scientific aims and global trade. Together, essays by anthropologists, art historians, artists, and curators form an extended conversation around the historical accumulation and commodification of artifacts and, in particular, the representation of the human body in ethnographic photographs. Rounding out the volume are many previously unpublished photographs of works discussed. Contributing authors and artist include Peggy Buth, Minerva Cuevas, Gabriel Gbadamosi, David Lau, Tom McCarthy, David Weber-Krebs, and Luke Willis-Thompson.
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The Cube and the Face: Around a Sculpture by Alberto Giacometti
Georges Didi-Huberman
Diaphanes, 2015
Alberto Giacometti’s 1934 Cube stands apart for many as atypical of the Swiss artist, the only abstract sculptural work in a wide oeuvre that otherwise had as its objective the exploration of reality.
With The Cube and the Face, renowned French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman has conducted a careful analysis of Cube, consulting the artist’s sketches, etchings, texts, and other sculptural works in the years just before and after Cube was created. Cube, he finds, is indeed exceptional—a work without clear stylistic kinship to the works that came before or after it. At the same time, Didi-Huberman shows, Cube marks the transition between the artist’s surrealist and realist phases and contains many elements of Giacometti’s aesthetic consciousness, including his interest in dimensionality, the relation of the body to geometry, and the portrait—or what Didi-Huberman terms “abstract anthropomorphism.” Drawing on Freud, Bataille, Leiris, and others Giacometti counted as influence, Didi-Huberman presents fans and collectors of Giacometti’s art with a new approach to transitional work.
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Towards an Aesthetics of Production
Sebastion Egenhofer
Diaphanes, 2017
Throughout the twentieth century, art history has been too narrowly focused on formalism. As a result, analyses regularly reduced works of art to their materials, texture, and composition. By contrast, art historian Sebastian Egenhofer takes Gilles Deleuze’s readings of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson as the basis for a new resistance to the overly reductive account of art history.
After laying out his argument for a new aesthetics of production in introductory chapters that discuss the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, as well as Heidegger and Kant, Egenhofer applies this theoretical framework to case studies on Michael Asher, Marcel Duchamp, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Piet Mondrian. An aesthetics of production does not, he argues, imply a nostalgia for the artisanal or for a work of art’s singularity, but a way to bring together elements of critical materialism with a thorough reevaluation of the modern art and abstraction.
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Thinking - Resisting - Reading the Political: Current Perspectives on Politics and Communities in the Arts Vol. 2
Anneka Esch-van Kan
Diaphanes, 2013
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The Public in the Picture: Involving the Beholder in Antique, Islamic, Byzantine, Western Medieval and Renaissance Art
Beate Fricke
Diaphanes, 2015
Library of Congress N5613P83 2015
The act of including bystanders within the scene of an artwork has marked an important shift in the ways artists addressed the beholder, as well as a significant transformation of the relationship between images and their viewership. In such works, the “public” in the picture could be seen as a mediating between different times, people, and contents.
With The Public in the Picture, contributors describe this shift, with each essay focusing on a specific group of works created at a different moment in history. Together, the contributions explore the political, religious, and social contexts of the publics depicted and relate this shift to the rise of perspectival representation. Contributors to The Public in the Picture include Andrew Griebler, Annette Haug, Henrike Haug, Christiane Hille, Christopher Lakey, Andrea Lermer, Cornelia Logemann, Anja Rathmann-Lutz, Alberto Saviello, and Daniela Wagner.
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From Science to Computational Sciences: Studies in the History of Computing and its Influence on Today‘s Sciences
Gabriele Gramelsberger
Diaphanes, 2011
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documenta 12 education I: Engaging audiences, opening institutions Methods and strategies in education at documenta 12
Ayse Güleç
Diaphanes, 2009
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Neighborhood Technologies: Media and Mathematics of Dynamic Networks
Tobias Harks
Diaphanes, 2015
Library of Congress HM741.N45 2015 | Dewey Decimal 307.3362
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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The Moses Complex: Freud, Schoenberg, Straub/Huillet
Ute Holl
Diaphanes, 2016
Moses has long been a source of modern fascination. For Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, Moses was a particularly fruitful subject for the study of memory and historiography. He also held great interest for the visual and performing arts. In the 1920s and ’30s, the composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote the three-act opera Moses and Aron. First performed just a few years before his exile to the United States, it required that its audiences distinguish voices from forceful background noise, just as Moses had to confront the burning bush before he could hear the voice of God. In 1974, filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet created an avant-garde cinematic adaptation of Schoenberg’s opera that continued the composer’s examination of the established hierarchies of seeing and hearing.
In The Moses Complex, Ute Holl analyzes these major works in detail and deep historical context, synthesizing the complex models of resistance to explore the relationships among media, migration, and politics. Since Moses descended from Sinai with the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, new media and new laws have often emerged simultaneously. Liberation, in particular, has been negotiated through many different cultural media, with psychoanalysis, music, and cinema all describing exodus and exile as a process of force. Offering a dynamic and comprehensive political and cultural theory of migration and violence, The Moses Complex speaks equally well to psychoanalytic, musical, and cinematic thinking as it does to our tendency toward violence in the treatment of migrants today.
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Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity: Current Perspectives on Politics and Communities in the Arts Vol. 1
Stefan Hölscher
Diaphanes, 2013
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Crédit et débit
Alexander Kluge
Diaphanes, 2013
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Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even
Gertrud Koch
Diaphanes, 2017
Breaking Bad is known for its grim and gritty outbursts of anger and violence. In the chaotic story of a meth-dealing high school chemistry teacher, time seems to collapse, and we feel as though the lives of the characters are moving inevitably closer to their ends. This warped perspective wends its way through virtually every aspect of the story, intensifying the meaning we attach to the characters’ precarious lives.
Hoping to cultivate a deeper understanding of the series, Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even offers a new way of approaching the program though its complex treatment of time. With its grotesque portrayal of life on the brink of death, argues Gertrud Koch, we can best view Breaking Bad as a black comedy between Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and film noir. Koch takes readers through the ways in which this is accomplished through the show’s various visual elements and masterful temporal and narrative structuring. Full of fascinating insights, the book will appeal to the show’s many fans, as well as anyone interested in film studies, media studies, or popular culture.
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The Past's Threshold: Essays on Photography
Siegfried Kracauer
Diaphanes, 2014
Siegfried Kracauer was a leading intellectual figure of the Weimar Republic and one of the foremost representatives of critical theory. Best known for a wealth of writings on sociology and film theory, his influence is felt in the work of many of the period’s preeminent thinkers, including his friends, the critic Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, who once claimed he owed more to Kracauer than any other contemporary.
This volume brings together for the first time all of Kracauer’s essays on photography that he wrote between 1927 and 1933 as a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, as well as an essay that appeared in the Magazine of Art after his exile in America, where he would spend the last twenty-five years of his life. The texts show Kracauer as a pioneering thinker of the photographic medium in addition to the important historian, and theorist, of film that he is acknowledged to have been. His writings here build a cohesive theory on the affinities between photography, memory and history.
With a foreword by Philippe Despoix offering insights into Kracauer’s theories and the historical context, and a Curriculum vitae in pictures, photographs from the Kracauer estate annotated by Maria Zinfert.
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Visualizing Portuguese Power: The Political Use of Images in Portugal and its Overseas Empire (16th-18th Century)
Urte Krass
Diaphanes, 2015
Images play a key role in political communication and the ways we come to understand the power structures that shape society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the process of empire building, in which visual language has long been a highly effective means of overpowering another culture with one’s own values and beliefs.
With Visualizing Portuguese Power, Urte Krass and a group of contributors examine the visual arts within the Portuguese empire between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. With a focus on the political appropriation of Portuguese-Christian art within the colonies, the book looks at how these and other objects could be staged to generate new layers of meaning. Beyond religious images, the book shows that the appropriation of the visual arts to reinforce important political concepts also took place in the outside the religious sphere, including adaptations of local artistic customs to reinforce Portuguese power.
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The Death of Socrates
Yann Le Bras
Diaphanes, 2015
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.
“Tell us, Delphic Oracle, who is the wisest man in all of Greece?” So begins The Death of Socrates. No mortal man is wiser than Socrates, who, on his daily walks through Athens, talks to all the people he meets. When the person he talks to takes himself to be very wise, Socrates asks so many questions that the person ends up admitting he knows nothing. When he runs into people who know little, Socrates sets them on the way to wisdom. But not everyone shares Socrates’s love for the truth. When the people of Athens become angry with him for his ceaseless questioning, how will he find the courage to continue to speak the truth?
Plato & Co.’s clear approach and charming illustrations make this series the perfect addition to any little library.
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Itérations
Arthur Lochmann
Diaphanes, 2013
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La réalité des médias de masse
Niklas Luhmann
Diaphanes, 2012
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Diogenes the Dog-Man
Yan Marchand
Diaphanes, 2017
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 Socrates to Descartes, 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.
In Diogenes the Dog-Man, the philosopher Diogenes not only admires the honesty of dogs, he has actually become one—sleeping, eating, and lifting his leg to pee wherever he chooses! Best of all, unlike humans, who dupe one another as to their true feelings, Diogenes the Dog-Man is free to bark his displeasure and even bite his adversaries in the calves—even if they happen to be Alexander the Great. Initially, the citizens gathered in the Agora think Diogenes is mad. Does he have rabies? But it soon becomes clear that we can all learn a thing or two from dogs about how to live a simple life.
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The Ghost of Karl Marx
Donatien Mary
Diaphanes, 2015
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.
In The Ghost of Karl Marx, the philosopher is saddened when the town weavers must sell their cloth cheaply to compete with machines. The farmers too cannot sell their crops and have no money to buy new seeds. Forced to leave their work, the townspeople form an angry crowd in front of the factories, but what is to be done when there are so many hungry people and so few jobs to pay for food to eat? Concealed in one of the weavers’ sheets, the philosopher makes a solemn vow to give this story a happy ending by finding the Market, that infernal magician, and ridding the town of him once and for all.
Plato & Co.’s clear approach and charming illustrations make this series the perfect addition to any little library.
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Recessional - Or, the Time of the Hammer
Tom McCarthy
Diaphanes, 2016
Modernist and contemporary literature are marked by a preoccupation with time, specifically with the passage of time characterized by starts and stops and suspended states of waiting. Acclaimed novelist Tom McCarthy brings out a temporal pattern, a subliminal convention of a certain fringe of modernism that works both in and against the canon of modernist literature in works by Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, Maurice Blanchot, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and William Faulkner, as well as in McCarthy’s own fiction.
The latest edition in Diaphanes’s THINK ART series, which explores the cultural and theoretical impact of artistic processes, Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer opens with an essay by McCarthy on recessional time as an aesthetic element and literary device. This essay is followed by an interview with McCarthy, in which he further discusses his own writing process, taking his most recent novel, Satin Island, as the starting point and casting new light on both avant-garde and realist literature.
Praise for Remainder
“An avant-garde challenge. . . . [McCarthy is] one of the great English novelists of the past ten years.”—Zadie Smith
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Epistemologies of Aesthetics
Dieter Mersch
Diaphanes, 2015
The ideas of “art as research” and ”research as art” have risen over the past two decades as important critical focuses for the philosophy of media, aesthetics, and art. Of particular interest is how the methodologies of art and science might be merged to create a better conceptual understanding of art-based research.
In Epistemologies of Aesthetics, Dieter Mersch deconstructs and displaces the terminology that typically accompanies the question of the relationship between art and scientific truth. Identifying artistic practices as modes of thought that do not make use of language in a way that can easily be translated into scientific discourse, Mersch advocate for an aesthetic mode of thought beyond the “linguistic turn,” a way of thinking that cannot be substituted by any other disciplinary system. A sophisticated reflection on the epistemological status of the aesthetic by one of Germany’s leading philosophers, Epistemologies of Aesthetics will be of great interest within this growing field of study.
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L'hypothèse d'instabilité financière: Les processus capitalistes et le comportement de l'économie
Hyman P. Minsky
Diaphanes, 2013
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Professor Kant's Incredible Day
Jean Paul Mongin
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.
In Professor Kant’s Incredible Day, the philosopher Immanuel Kant wants only to be left in peace to consider life’s big questions: What can I know? What can I hope for? But, when a perfumed letter arrives one day, it interrupts his studies and sets off a series of events the dour professor could not possibly have predicted. But just when it seems as though all of Königsberg is plunged into chaos, he realizes that this perfect storm may hold the answers to his most pressing questions.
Plato & Co.’s clear approach and charming illustrations make this series the perfect addition to any little library.
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Mister Descartes and His Evil Genius
Jean Paul Mongin
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! Plato & Co. introduces children—and curious grown-ups—to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Socrates to Descartes, 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.
On a peaceful winter night while the rest of the town sleeps, Mister Descartes stays up late reading the great books of the world. Suddenly, by the light of the moon, he sees a strange and fearsome shape in the shadow of his pet parrot, Baruch. Is it an illusion, or could it be that his faithful pet is but a figment of his imagination? Could the same be true of his room and all of sleepy Holland? Quite obviously, he cannot rely on his senses, so how can Mister Descartes arrive at any certainty about the world around him? How will he determine what is a clever trick and what is real?
Plato & Co.’s clear approach and charming illustrations make this series the perfect addition to any little library.
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Albert Einstein's Bright Ideas
Frédéric Morlot
Diaphanes, 2017
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 Socrates to Descartes, 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.
In Albert Einstein’s Flashes of Inspiration, the young Albert Einstein has a very important job: he must deliver electricity to the big Oktoberfest celebration in Munich. As he hurries from one merry-go-round to another, nothing seems to be going as planned. With his sister, Maja, Heinrich the dog, and Niels Bohr, a qualified dwarf-thrower, can he win a battle against the laws of the universe? The key just may lie in the question of whether a dumpling can fly faster than light?
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Dr. Freud, Fish Whisperer
Marion Muller-Colard
Diaphanes, 2017
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 Socrates to Descartes, 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.
Sprawled in his favorite armchair, Dr. Freud notices a peculiar phrase in pages of his notebook: “preaching to the fishes.” What could he have meant by this? If there’s one thing he has learned working as a psychoanalyst, it’s that the best way to make sense of yourself is through your dreams—and so he settles down for a nice long nap. But no sooner does his head hit the pillow than he begins to hear voices! A frightened fish with a childhood memory lodged in its throat coaxes Dr. Freud into the cold water, where his ideas come to life through an unforgettable cast of characters, including a loquacious carp and three frogs—Id, Ego, and Superego—locked in fierce competition for a single waterlily.
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Hannah Arendt's Little Theater
Marion Muller-Colard
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! Plato & Co. introduces children—and curious grown-ups—to the lives and work of famous philosophers, from Socrates to Descartes, 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.
In Hannah Arendt’s Little Theater, the philosopher Hannah Arendt is about to finish her last book, but she is sure something is missing. As she puzzles over her words, she is visited by a friend from the past—none other than her nine-year-old self! Reluctantly, she accepts young Hannah’s helping hand, joining the small blue-cardiganed girl on an adventure through the streets of New York City to a tiny theater where they watch a frightening play about a town terrorized by an evil wolf and his pack of puppets. But, even in the blackest moments, when evil seems sure to prevail, it is always possible to turn things around. Could the same be said of the “theater” of the real world, in which real people come together to create change?
Plato & Co.’s clear approach and charming illustrations make this series the perfect addition to any little library.
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documenta 12 education 2: Between Critical Practice and Visitor Services Results of a Research Project
Carmen Mörsch
Diaphanes, 2009
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Qu'appelons-nous penser?
Jean-Luc Nancy
Diaphanes, 2013
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Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences 1946-1953. The Complete Transactions
Claus Pias
Diaphanes, 2016
Between 1946 and 1953, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation sponsored a series of conferences aiming to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary community of scholars and researchers who would join forces to lay the groundwork for the new science of cybernetics. These conferences, known as the Macy conferences, constituted a landmark for the field. They were the first to grapple with new terms such as information and feedback and to develop a cohesive and broadly applicable theory of systems that would become equally applicable to living beings and machines, economic and cognitive processes, and many scholarly disciplines. The concepts that emerged from the conferences come to permeate thinking in many fields, including biology, neurology, sociology, ecology, economics, politics, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and computer science.
This book contains the complete transcripts of all ten Macy conferences and the guidelines for the conference proceedings. These transcripts are supplemented with an introduction by Claus Pias that charts the significance of the Macy conferences to the history of science.
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Computer Game Worlds
Claus Pias
Diaphanes, 2017
Computer games have become ubiquitous in today’s society. Many scholars have speculated on the reasons for their massive success. Yet we haven’t considered the most basic questions: Why do computer games exist? What specific circumstances led to the creation of this entirely new type of game? What sorts of knowledge facilitated the requisite technological and institutional transformations?
With Computer Game Worlds, Claus Pias sets out to answer these questions. Tracing computer games from their earliest forms to the unstoppable commercial and cultural phenomena they have become today, Pias then provides a careful epistemological reconstruction of the process of playing games, both at computers and by computers themselves. The book makes a valuable theoretical contribution to the ongoing discussion about computer games.
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Beyond Potentialities?: Politics between the Possible and the Impossible
Mark Potocnik
Diaphanes, 2011
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Christian Marazzi: Le socialisme du capital
Judith Revel
Diaphanes, 2017
Depuis l'effondrement des banques en 2008, le capitalisme semble être entré dans une phase de stagnation durable, mais aussi dans une instabilité géopolitique et monétaire. Le scénario qui se joue sous nos yeux évoque une sorte de « socialisme du capital » : l’État, qui subvient aux besoins des « soviets de la finance », impose à la société la dictature du marché. Plutôt qu’un effet parasite du capitalisme, cette financiarisation pourrait bien constituer la forme aussi essentielle que perverse de son nouveau régime.
Les textes rassemblés dans le présent recueil analysent et commentent les changements économiques survenus ces dix dernières années en revenant sur leurs acteurs principaux, sur certains symptômes de la crise ainsi que sur des phénomènes qui ont pu apparaître jusque-là comme marginaux. Loin d’adopter une approche simplificatrice ou moralisante, Christian Marazzi relit les enseignements de Michel Foucault sur la biopolitique pour tenter d’interpréter les bouleversements contemporains comme des transformations fondamentales du politique.
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Art and Contemporaneity
Frank Ruda
Diaphanes, 2015
Art is often said to be timeless, but specific works of art always take place within time and maintain a dynamic balance between their conditions of production and reception.
Art and Contemporaneity features contributions from leading scholars, including Alain Badiou and Alexander García Düttmann, who bring theories of aesthetic philosophy to bear on one of the most crucial questions about contemporary art: how do works of art come to exist within and in relation to time? A specific temporality of an artwork emerges from the material and political conditions of its production. But works of art also forge new relationships to time in their reception, which are continually superimposed upon layers of history. With a broad range of perspectives, Art and Contemporaneity offers a sustained reflection on the relationship between art and time, and it will appeal to those interested in both the theory and practice of contemporary art.
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Reiner Schuermann: Des hégémonies brisées
Reiner Schuermann
Diaphanes, 2017
Le b-a ba du métier n’est-il pas d’assurer un fondement, non-fondé mais capable néanmoins d’ancrer les prémisses m’instruisant sur ce que je puis savoir et sur ce que je dois faire ? Comprise ainsi, la norme ne se justifie pas ; en quoi elle est fantasmatique. Mais elle justifie tout ce qui peut devenir phénomène pendant l’époque linguistique à laquelle elle imprime sa marque ; en quoi elle est hégémonique. S’il s’avère qu’un tel référent non-référable à quelque instance supérieure se maintient tant que prédomine une langue, alors l’histoire à retracer sera celle des fantasmes hégémoniques grec, latin, et moderne. Un fantasme est hégémonique quand toute une culture s’y fie comme si elle tenait là au nom de quoi parler et agir. Pareil représenté-chef (hêgemôn) travaille le singulier qui est indicible, en le disant part d’un tout. Les hégémonies tournent le singulier en du particulier.
Il s’agira donc de retracer une histoire de soumissions par nous-mêmes encourues.
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Le principe d’anarchie: Heidegger et la question de l'agir
Reiner Schürmann
Diaphanes, 2013
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Luther. The Origin of Modern Self-Consciousness: Reiner Schürmann Lecture Notes
Reiner Schürmann
Diaphanes
If we are to understand the specifically modern function of self-consciousness, we must first look to the origins of the concept. Among the key thinkers who elaborated on self-consciousness was the German monk and theologian Martin Luther. Reiner Schuermann’s writings and lectures on Luther therefore offer an innovative reading of the systematic role of self-consciousness in both premodern and modern cultures.
This volume in a planned twenty-nine-part series, Reiner Schuermann: Luther. The Origin of Modern Self-Consciousness sees Schuermann tracing Luther’s conception of the rise of self-consciousness as the subjective reference point. Schuermann then explores this conception in conversation with both the Cartesian cogito and Kantian apperception.
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Origins
Reiner Schürmann
Diaphanes, 2016
“Born too late to see the war and too early to forget it.” So writes Reiner Schürmann in Origins, a startlingly personal account of life as a young man from postwar Germany in the 1960s. Schürmann’s semi-autobiographical protagonist is incapable of escaping a past he never consciously experienced. All around him are barely concealed reminders of Nazi-inflicted death and destruction. His own experiences of displacement and rootlessness, too, are the burden of a cruel collective past. His story presents itself as a continuous quest for—and struggle to free himself from—his origins. The hero is haunted relentlessly by his fractured identity—in his childhood at his father’s factory, where he learns of the Nazi past through a horrible discovery; in an Israeli kibbutz, where, after a few months of happiness, he is thrown out for being a German; in postwar Freiburg, where he reencounters a friend who escaped the Nazi concentration camps; and finally, in the United States, where his attempts at a fresh start almost fail to exorcise the ghosts of the past.
Originally published in French in 1976, Origins was the winner of the coveted Prix Broquette-Gonin of the Académie Francaise. In close collaboration with the author, this meticulously crafted translation was created in the early 1990s, but Schürmann’s premature death in 1993 prevented its publication process and, as a result, one of the most important literary accounts of the conflicted process of coming to terms with the Holocaust and Germany’s Nazi past has been unavailable to English readers until now. Candid and frank, filled with fury and caustic sarcasm, Origins offers insight into a generation caught between disappointment and rage, alignment and rebellion, guilt and obsession with the past.
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The Thought of Becoming: Gilles Deleuze’s Poetics of Life
Kathrin Thiele
Diaphanes, 2008
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Disabled Theater
Sandra Umathum
Diaphanes, 2015
Library of Congress PN1590.H36D57 2015
Jérôme Bel’s Disabled Theater, a dance piece featuring eleven actors with cognitive disabilities from Zurich’s Theater Hora, has polarized audiences worldwide. Some have celebrated the performance as an outstanding exploration of presence and representation; others have criticized it as a contemporary freak show. This impassioned reception provokes important questions about the role of people with cognitive disabilities within theater and dance—and within society writ large. Using Disabled Theater as the basis for a broad, interdisciplinary discussion of performance and disability, this volume explores the intersections of politics and aesthetics, inclusion and exclusion, and identity and empowerment. Can the stage serve as a place of emancipation for people with disabilities? To what extent are performers with disabilities able to challenge and subvert the rules of society? What would a performance look like without an ideology of ability? The book includes contributions by Jérôme Bel, Kai van Eikels, Kati Kroß, André Lepecki, Lars Nowak, Yvonne Rainer, Gerald Siegmund, Yvonne Schmidt, Sandra Umathum, Scott Wallin, Benjamin Wihstutz, and the actors of Theater Hora.
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De l'indécision
Joseph Vogl
Diaphanes, 2016
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Le spectre du capital
Joseph Vogl
Diaphanes, 2010
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Epidemic Subjects - Radical Ontology
Elisabeth von Samsonow
Diaphanes, 2016
Modern philosophy continues to grapple with the idea of subjectivity—and, as the concept of subjectivity has consequently been repeatedly refined and redefined, the struggle has spread to the ways we conceive of sovereignty, collectivity, nationality, and identity as a result. Yet, in the absence of an authoritative account of these central philosophical concepts, exciting new ways of thinking have emerged which continue to develop and evolve.
Epidemic Subjects—Radical Ontology brings together a renowned team of contributors, including Levi Bryant, Angela Melitopoulos, and Susan Stryker, who together forge a radically inclusive definition of subjectivity. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the “girl” as a heuristic device for examining modern society and its foundations, they tie together recent trends in philosophy and offer a concrete way forward from the conception of the “thing” or “object” privileged by new materialism, speculative realism, and other theories of subjectivity.
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Fragile Identities
Susanne Witzgall
Diaphanes, 2016
What is the current state of the subject and what about the status of its self-image? In contemporary discourses we encounter more and more “fragile identities,” in artistic works as well as in scientific theories, and those are today much less referring to a critique of the concept of identity, but much rather to the relationship those concepts of identity entertain with the overall precarious state of the subject in current social conditions that are characterized by political upheaval and change.
The book Fragile Identities investigates among other things the chances and also the possible endangerments of such a fragile self and asks for the resurging urgency of a contemporary concept of subjectivity. The publication combines international artistic and scholarly contributions, discussions and project documentations in relation to the second annual theme of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.
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Power of Material/Politics of Materiality
Susanne Witzgall
Diaphanes, 2014
Materiality has emerged as a new focus for art, design, and architecture. Where there was once the belief that the form of a work offered more capacity to bestow meaning, “New Materialism” asserts the agency of material within the artistic process, enmeshed as it is within a web of relationships.
For Power of Material—Politics of Materiality, editors Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier have brought together a diverse and interdisciplinary team of contributors to deepen the current discourse surrounding materiality. The contributors were participants at a lecture series held at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, and, the book presents the resultant discussions and experimental practices.
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The Present of the Future
Susanne Witzgall
Diaphanes, 2018
As the world teeters on the brink of crisis and potentially catastrophic change, outlooks for the future have come to be characterized by anxiety. The skepticism that meets utopian visions of the future has given rise to collective nostalgia for seemingly reliable ideas. But rather than stagnate in idealism, how can artists and scholars create the potential for real change?
The result of a lecture series held at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, The Present of the Future explores our current relationship to the future and considers strategies for artists and scholars to establish effective action for shaping alternative futures. Contributors to the book approach this problem from the perspective of diverse disciplines, including art, design, architecture, and philosophy.
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Vision in Motion: Streams of Sensation and Configurations of Time
Michael F. Zimmermann
Diaphanes, 2015
Library of Congress N7430.5.V57 2016
Vision is not just a simple recognition of what passes through our field of sight, the reflection and observation of light and shape. Even before Freud posited dreams as a way of “seeing” even as we sleep, the writings of philosophers, artists, and scientists from Goethe to Cézanne have argued that to understand vision as a mere mirroring of the outside world is to overlook a more important cognitive act of seeing that is dependent on time.
Bringing together a renowned international group of contributors, Vision in Motion explores one of the most vexing problems in the study of vision and cognition: To make sense of the sensations we experience when we see something, we must configure many moments into a synchronous image. This volume offers a critical reexamination of seeing that restores a concept of “vision in motion” that avoids reducing the sensations we experience to narrative chronological sequencing. The contributors draw on Hume, Bergson, and Deleuze, among others, to establish a nuanced idea of how we perceive.
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Kracauer. Photographic Archive
Maria Zinfert
Diaphanes, 2014
Library of Congress TR653.K73 2014
Siegfried Kracauer was a leading figure on the Weimar arts scene and one of the foremost representatives of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Best known for a wealth of writings on sociology and film theory, his influence is felt in the work of many of the period’s preeminent thinkers, including the critic Theodor W. Adorno, who once claimed he owed more to Kracauer than any other intellectual.
Kracauer.Photographic Archive, a companion volume to The Past’s Threshold: Essays on Photography, collects previously unpublished photographs by Siegfried and Elisabeth, “Lili,” Kracauer. With its remarkably rich material, the book tells the story of the Kracauer’s close working relationship, from their marriage in Germany to their escape to Paris and the war and postwar years in the United States. While neither Kracauer nor his wife trained in photography, their portraits, city views, and landscapes evince impressive aesthetic and technical skill, while simultaneously shedding light on their lives marked by exile and flight.
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