Books published by Diaphanes AG

David Graeber's influential thinking was always at odds with the liberal and left-wing mainstream. Drawing on his huge theoretical and practical experience as an ethnologist and anthropologist, activist and anarchist, Graeber and his interlocutors develop a ramified genealogy of anarchist thought and possible perspectives for 21st-century politics. Diverging from the familiar lines of historical anarchism, and against the background of movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Gilets jaunes, the aim is to provide new political impulses that go beyond the usual schemata of unavoidableness. The spontaneous and swift-moving polylogue shows Graeber as a spirited, unorthodox thinker and radical activist for whom the group can always achieve more than the individual.

A personal take on French Theory by one of the people who invented it.

How to teach art? What kind of knowledge should artists absorb? How might an ordinary person become a creature addicted to the creative process; a non-artist become an artist? Such programmatic questions articulated by the acclaimed Polish artist Artur Zmijewski were at the heart of the workshop "How to Teach Art?" Between April and July 2018, Zmijewski invited a group of graduate and PhD students from three Zurich universities-the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), the UZH (University of Zurich), and the ZHdK (Zurich University of the Arts)-to collectively reflect on their artistic practices. Over the course of four months, the group met several times a week for hourlong sessions, following individual and collective exercises devised by Zmijewski himself.This book retraces the workshop and its process by means of inconclusive, fragmentary results between theory and practice:. It presents drawings, videos, photographs, 16mm films, and accompanying reflections on the central premise, "How to Teach Art?"

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. With contributions by Philip Ursprung, Julie Harboe, Stewart Martin, Joshua Simon, and Sharon Kivland.

What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a '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 can play an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic; 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.

In this lecture course, Reiner Schürmann reads Marx's work as a transcendental materialism. Arguing that what is most original in Marx is neither his political or sociological nor his economic thinking, but his philosophical axis, Schürmann shows that Marx conceives being as polyvalent praxis. With patient rigor, Schürmann delineates this notion of praxis from the interpretations proposed by Louis Althusser and the Frankfurt School, as he traces Marx's move beyond the dualism that has governed ontology since Descartes. Stepping out of this dualism, however, Marx does not espouse a monism either-be it an immobile one as Parmenides', or a dynamic one as Hegel's. On the problem of universals, Marx's transcendental materialism is nominalistic: being as action is irreducibly manifold. Extending his highly original engagement with the history of philosophy, Schürmann in the course of these lectures draws out the philosophical axis in Marx's work, which determines and localizes his theories of history, of social relations and of economy. On this view, Marx's unique place in philosophy stems from the fact that the grounding of phenomena is seen by him not as a relation that produces cognition, as in Kant; nor as a relation of material sensitivity, as in Feuerbach; but the grounding occurs in labor, in praxis, in the satisfaction of needs. Whereas the Marxist readings of Marx conceive history, classes and social relations as primary realities, Schürmann brings out a radically immanent understanding of praxis in Marx that introduces multiplicity into being. Following Schürmann's own suggestion, this edition is complemented by a reprinting of his Anti-Humanism essay, in which he reads Marx alongside Nietzsche and Heidegger as spelling out the dissociation of being and action. This rupture puts an end to the epochal economy of presence and returns principles to their own precariousness. As a whole, this volume brings out one of the less appreciated facets of Schürmann's work and offers an interpretation of Marx that resonates with the readings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, Antonio Negri and François Laruelle.