‘What words shall I use? What are the proper words?’ asks Electra, amid the tumult and the danger, the ravings, the revenge (Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers). In naming this journal Electra, we are making her questions our own. In choosing a name that comes from Ancient Greece, where thought emerged in all its apotheoses and disasters, in all its harmonies and conflicts, we are stating our commitment to all liberties and all dangers. The best and the worst in us were born there.

The city centre faces a time of accelerated transformations and sudden ruptures. The geographer Álvaro Domingues reflects on the subject, against the backdrop of a long-standing politics/city binomial.

His immense work, which traverses a number of disciplines, gives good reason for this interview with Boris Groys. Moving in such areas as philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, art history and media theory, he has applied his vast erudition and his originality of thought to contemporary art, its system and its institutions. Born in 1947 in the former Democratic Republic of Germany, Boris Groys grew up in the Soviet Union, where he studied Mathematics, Logic and Linguistics. When he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1981, he brought with him a deep knowledge of the Russian vanguards and Soviet art. The relations between art and politics, and between the artist and society, are favoured by this former professor of the famous Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (1994–2009) who is now Global Distinguished Professor at the New York University.

What remains of the Georges Pompidou Centre forty years after it was inaugurated? What remains of its innovative cultural project and its ideas on contemporary art? These questions are candidly answered by Yves Michaud, a philosopher and art critic, and Catherine Lawless, a member of the Centre's initial team.

Lourdes Castro was born in 1930, in Funchal, Portugal, and her origins are present in her work like a watermark. She studied Painting at Lisbon’s School of Fine Arts (1950–1956). She lived in Munich for some time and, in 1958, she moved to Paris. In 1983, she went back to the island of Madeira, where she currently lives.

António Franco Alexandre is a leading figure of contemporary Portuguese poetry. His path is solitary, made of inflections and profound variations. From one book to another, we can read the disquiet and the analytical hyperconsciousness that are also the traits of a way of living. His friend and fellow poet Helder Moura Pereira translated his verses expressly for this issue.

Bologna, the city of porticos, towers, and the oldest university in Europe, the city where Pasolini was born, is read, in its metamorphoses, as a palimpsest by a philosopher who lives there. Under the surge of tourism, the city resists and survives, emerging as all that is contained in the word ‘tradition’.

An essential task of our historical consciousness is to think about the time we live in, and to present it as a complex unity for which we have no name. The evident manifestations of the age and its less visible but distinctive traits are the topics of five texts that make up the special feature of this inaugural issue.

A brief sentence written by Jules Michelet in 1929, both enigmatic and evident, has lent itself to many glosses and interpretations: Chaque époque rêve la suivante. It is a thought-provoking phrase, to which one delights in responding — with Walter Benjamin in sight.

Two conflicting views on Universal Basic Income inaugurate a section committed to embrace opposition and ideological debates. In recent years, the idea of allocating a general basic income to all citizens has been the subject of an intense and widespread public discussion; positions for and against the UBI have traversed the Right and the Left taunting their established boundaries.

A book on the moral discourse of merchandise, on commodities as ‘goods’, presented by its translator, who was also its co-editor.

A retrospective and comprehensive look on contemporary cinematographic production in Portugal, by an attentive French viewer and scholar. The national and international diffusion of Portuguese cinema and its self-representations owe much to these visions coming from abroad.

A critical reading of Alain Badiou’s lessons on the Wagner 'case' — the aesthetic-political argument for the total work of art.

Familiar and ambiguous term, originally referring to the realm of things (from the Latin res, realis) or that which concerns them. In recent years, however, this general definition has acquired a new scope. Whereas the 20th century was the age of ideology, the last decades have brought with them a new fondness for reality. It has become a habit to appeal to common sense, to the power of things, to the weight of facts and circumstances. The great doctrines of the past, deemed too abstract, have given way to concrete principles. Thinkers and politicians have settled down, planted their feet on the ground, and learned to see the world as it really is.