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Aesthetic Theory
Edited by Dieter Mersch, Sandro Zanetti, and Sylvia Sasse
Diaphanes, 2019
Theodor Adorno’s famous aesthetic theory was not merely a theory of the aesthetic; it also made a wider claim about the aesthetic implications of all theory. At the same time we have to deal with aesthetic objects and events in which an aesthetic theory is inherent, which show themselves as art. From both sides—theory and aesthetics—a link can be made to the etymological meaning of theōria, which understands the theoretical as a seeing or perspective. Featuring lucid essays by major thinkers, the book examines this link, focusing equally on the aesthetic implications of theory and the theoretical implications of aesthetic events.
 
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Aesthetics of the Commons
Edited by Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder, and Shusha Niederberger
Diaphanes, 2021
What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a so-called pirate library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art plays an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic, and that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially.
 
Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a double character. They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are operational in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the commons. In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a thinking tool—in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.
 
 
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After the Crisis
Contemporary States of Photography
Edited by Donatien Grau and Christoph Wiesner
Diaphanes, 2019
After the Crisis offers 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. Contributors come from the realms of critical theory, fiction, performance art, fashion photography, and museums, as well as film and design, and their conversations bring together history and the contemporary. Comparing the current situation of photographic images with the crisis experienced by representation at the time of the birth of photography, they set our relationship with photographic images in the digital era in perspective. Through these discussions, we come to sense the existential burden of being surrounded by images, while also beginning to grasp the historical depth of a questioning of images that started long before the current generation and engages with crucial political and cultural issues of our time. 
 
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Albert Einstein's Bright Ideas
Frédéric Morlot and Anne-Margot Ramstein
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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Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking
Conversations with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nika Dubrovsky, and Assia Turquier-Zauberman
David Graeber
Diaphanes, 2020
David Graeber was not only one of today’s most important living thinkers, but also one of the most influential. He was also one of the very few engaged intellectuals who has a proven track record of effective militancy on a world scale, and his impact on the international left cannot be overstated.

Graeber has offered up perhaps the most credible path for exiting capitalism—as much through his writing about debt, bureaucracy, or “bullshit jobs” as through his crucial involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which led to his more-or-less involuntary exile from the American academy. In short, Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking presents a series of interviews with a first-rate intellectual, a veritable modern hero on the order of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Linus Torvald, Aaron Swartz, and Elon Musk.

Interviewers Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Assia Turquier-Zauberman asked Graeber not only about the history of anarchy, but also about its contemporary relevance and future. Their conversation also explores the ties between anthropology and anarchism, and the traces of its DNA in the Occupy Wall Street and Yellow Vest movements. Finally, Graeber discussed the meaning of anarchist ethics—not only in the political realm, but also in terms of art, love, sexuality, and more. With astonishing humor, verve, and erudition, this book redefines the contours of what could be (in the words of Peter Kropotkin) “anarchist morality” today. 
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Après la Crise
États contemporains de la photographie
Edited by Donatien Grau and Christoph Wiesner
Diaphanes, 2019
Après la crise établit une plateforme de conversation entre protagonistes de l’art, de l’écriture, de la théorie, de l’exposition, et de l’histoire, afin d’interroger le statut de la photographie aujourd’hui. Les contributeurs viennent des domaines de la théorie critique, de la fiction, de la performance, de la photographie de mode, des musées, du cinéma et du design, et leurs discussions réunissent l’histoire et le contemporain. Ces échanges établissent des parallèles entre la situation actuelle des images photographiques et la crise vécue par la représentation au temps de la naissance de la photographie ; ils mettent en perspective notre relation aux images photographiques à l’ère numérique, et nous permettent de voir en la photographie un médium, une voie pour explorer la politique, l’esthétique, les émotions de nos vies. Au travers de ces conversations vivantes, et des introductions sagaces qui les précèdent, nous en venons à ressentir le fardeau existentiel d’être entouré par des images, tout en commençant à saisir la profondeur historique d’un questionnement des images qui s’ouvrit bien avant la génération actuelle, et qui se confronte aux sujets politiques et culturels cruciaux de notre temps. Avec les contributions de Philippe Artières, Osei Bonsu, Emma Bowkett, Elisabeth Bronfen, Emanuele Coccia, ­Russell ­Ferguson, ­Dominique de Font-­Réaulx, Marc Fumaroli, Leigh Ledare, Kieran Long, Roxana Marcoci, Renzo ­Martens, Paul ­McCarthy, Tom McCarthy, Pascale Montandon-­Jodorowsky, ­ORLAN, Alice Rawsthorn, Jeff Rosenheim, ­Elisa Schaar, ­Bruno Serralongue, Devika Singh, Abdellah Taïa, ­Oliviero ­Toscani, Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh ­Matadin, Wim Wenders, Richard Wentworth.
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The Architectural Casino
Synching Haifa’s Modernisms
Ines Weizman
Diaphanes, 2024
A French-language edition, which offers a new approach Weizman names “documentary architecture," meaning that to write about the history of a building is also to map the world in which it is located.
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Architectures of Embodiment
Disclosing New Intelligibilities
Edited by Alex Arteaga
Diaphanes, 2021
This book was originated within the research environment Architecture of Embodiment, which inquires into architecture from an enactivist perspective and through aesthetic practices. This research environment does not primarily aim to formulate answers to its main research question—how does architecture condition the emergence of sense?—but to provide the adequate conceptual, methodological, and communicative conditions to address it. Ultimately, it aims to destabilize its objects of research in order to disclose new intelligibilities of the issues under inquiry. In this sense, Architecture of Embodiment, as an environment, intends to fulfill a fundamental cognitive function of research through aesthetic practices.

Architectures of Embodiment is a constellation of coexisting autonomous artifacts: texts by Alex Arteaga, Mika Elo, Ana García Varas, Lidia Gasperoni, Jonathan Hale, Susanne Hauser, Dieter Mersch and Gerard Vilar in dialogue with one another through comments and comments on the comments. It is conceived as a dialogical research dispositive: an invitation to participate in an open-ended process of research within a growing ecology of research practices.
 
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Archive Matter
A Camera in the Laboratory of the Modern
Liliana Gómez
Diaphanes, 2023

A journey through the United Fruit Company’s photo archive and its documentation of corporate expansion into the Caribbean.

The establishment of the United Fruit Company as a global political agent with its banana plantations was met with considerable resistance. Now the company’s photographic records are the focal point of Archive Matter as it examines photography’s historical and political impact through the argument that this overlooked, but important, archive made capitalist expansion into the Caribbean possible.

Author Liliana Gómez examines the images from within their “optical unconscious” and via the archive’s silences and omissions. The implication of these silences, Gómez argues, is the attempt to conceal the violence embedded within the realities of the plantations’ daily operations and corporate efforts to “modernize” the Caribbean.

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Art and Contemporaneity
Edited by Frank Ruda and Jan Voelker
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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Artaud 1937 Apocalypse
Letters from Ireland
Antonin Artaud
Diaphanes, 2019
Antonin Artaud’s journey to Ireland in 1937 marked an extraordinary—and apocalyptic—turning point in his life and career. After publishing the manifesto The New Revelations of Being about the “catastrophic immediate-future,” Artaud abruptly left Paris for Ireland, remaining there for six weeks without money. Traveling first to the isolated island of Inishmore off Ireland’s western coast, then to Galway, and finally to Dublin, Artaud was eventually arrested as an undesirable alien, beaten by the police, and summarily deported back to France. On his return, he spent nine years in asylums, remaining there through the entire span of World War II.

During his fateful journey, Artaud wrote letters to friends in Paris which included several “magic spells,” intended to curse his enemies and protect his friends from the city’s forthcoming incineration and the Antichrist’s appearance. (To André Breton, he wrote: “It’s the Unbelievable—yes, the Unbelievable—it’s the Unbelievable which is the truth.”) This book collects all of Artaud’s surviving correspondence from his time in Ireland, as well as photographs of the locations he traveled through. Featuring an afterword and notes by the book’s translator, Stephen Barber, this edition marks the seventieth anniversary of Artaud’s death.
 
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Artaud the Mômo
Antonin Artaud
Diaphanes, 2020
Artaud the Mômo is Antonin Artaud’s most extraordinary poetic work from the brief final phase of his life, from his return to Paris in 1946 after nine years of incarceration in French psychiatric institutions to his death in 1948. This work is an unprecedented anatomical excavation carried through in vocal language, envisioning new gestural futures for the human body in its splintered fragments. With black humor, Artaud also illuminates his own status as the scorned, Marseille-born child-fool, the “mômo” (a self-naming that fascinated Jacques Derrida in his writings on this work). Artaud moves between extreme irreligious obscenity and delicate evocations of his immediate corporeal perception and his sense of solitude. The book’s five-part sequence ends with Artaud’s caustic denunciation of psychiatric institutions and of the very concept of madness itself.

This edition is translated by Clayton Eshleman, the acclaimed foremost translator of Artaud’s work. This will be the first edition since the original 1947 publication to present the work in the spatial format Artaud intended. It also incorporates eight original drawings by Artaud—showing reconfigured bodies as weapons of resistance and assault—which he selected for that edition, after having initially attempted to persuade Pablo Picasso to collaborate with him. Additional critical material draws on Artaud’s previously unknown manuscript letters written between 1946 and 1948 to the book’s publisher, Pierre Bordas, which give unique insights into the work from its origins to its publication.
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