History is made up of what continues within us; it reminds us of what we did not live, or imagines what we have lived, which consequently becomes even more ours. The great historian Fernand Braudel, in one of his Écrits sur l’histoire, states that great political and social upheavals urge us to think or rethink the Universe.

The most important Italian literary critic, Alfonso Berardinelli who gave a valuable interview in Electra 20, writes here about Italo Calvino, the great author who, guided by structuralism, took narrative, the short story and short forms to a supreme level of literary construction.

Michael Hardt, one of the most distinguished political theorists of our time, talks to Electra about love and revolution, language and liberation, and his new project about the renewed urgency of looking at the global revolutionary movements of the 1970s.

Nesta evocação de Tokushima, no Japão, José Bértolo segue o rasto — isto é, as palavras e as imagens — do diplomata e escritor Wenceslau de Moraes e do cineasta Paulo Rocha. O primeiro fez do Japão a sua morada e o segundo fez de Wenceslau o seu fantasma. Ao percorrer os caminhos de Tokushima, esta evocação fala-nos do desejo de conhecer e também da vida e da morte. Daí o seu título enigmático. O autor é professor, ensaísta (escreve sobre cinema e fotografia) e fotógrafo.

Uma lei do excesso governa o mundo contemporâneo em todos os domínios. Os produtos da sociedade do consumo, a lógica financeira, a riqueza e a pobreza, os fenómenos da vida social e política, o crescimento das cidades, a circulação de pessoas e mercadorias, o lixo e os resíduos: tudo abandonou a justa medida e se pôs a crescer e a proliferar sem contenção. Somos confrontados incessantemente com a morfologia da obesidade e do monstro. Traduzindo esta regra em termos estéticos, podemos dizer que o mundo se tornou eminentemente barroco, já não conhece a quieta grandeza e a nobre simplicidade do clássico. Como sabemos, muitas são as disfunções e as formas de entropia que se geram quando tudo aquilo que determina o mundo pragmático vai para além dos seus próprios fins. É do excesso e dos seus efeitos, em várias áreas, que tratam os artigos deste dossier.

A verse from a poem by Fernando Pessoa, if regarded autonomously, would appear to be a proposition that could have been taken from a philosophical work or a reflection that takes on the form of an aphorism that produces false evidence. Here, poet and professor of Literature Amândio Reis comments on the verse quoted above.

Visual artist Mónica de Miranda, historian Sónia Vaz Borges and choreographer Vânia Gala form the collective representing Portugal at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale, whose general theme is ‘Foreigners Everywhere’. The three authors have contributed to this edition of Electra with texts and images that reveal the major themes and motivations of the ‘Greenhouse’ project showcased in the Portuguese pavilion located at Palazzo Franchetti. This project features a Creole garden which serves as a starting point for exploring the themes of colonialism, war, liberation struggles, and ecology.

The Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cesare, author, among other works, of The Time of Revolt, travelled to Portugal in 1975 to witness the ongoing revolution that had had a major impact in Italy. Almost half a century later, she now gives her account of that ‘revolutionary holiday’.

Continuing his journey around the Mediterranean, André Príncipe visited Tunisia. In La Goulette, at the port of Tunis, in the 19th century called ‘la petite Sicile’, he attended a concert by Badiaa Bouhrizi, known by her stage name Neysatu. It is with this singer songwriter, author and composer, an activist for freedom and social justice, that the photographer and editor converses, on behalf of Electra, about politics, music, djinns and African identities. Words join images here in an interview that addresses some of the themes of our global contemporaneity.

A ‘forest city’ is what Ruedi Baur is proposing in opposition to the ongoing urban destruction that is driving citizens and city-dwellers out of the city. The author of this article is a French-Swiss designer with a remarkable international career. He is the creator of the visual identity of the Pompidou Centre and a professor at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon.

Robert Musil’s essays, recently translated into Portuguese under the title Ensaios [Essays], are the perfect embodiment of an era of which we have only recently perhaps been able to make sense. Nélio Conceição, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at NOVA University Lisbon, sheds light on their wide scope.

Afonso Dias Ramos writes about the recent release in France of an unpublished course on the relationship between painting and philosophy given by Gilles Deleuze in 1981, after moving to the University of Saint-Denis. This is an editorial milestone, rendering available to the public the French philosopher’s legendary weekly lectures from 1970 to 1987, which, up until now, had only been shared as audio recordings.

Toxic people, toxic environments, toxic whatnot – you know the spiel. Really toxic language, however, is the aftermath of an idea, and words come with a predefined format, as if they were not speech at all, but set in stone. And that stone is carried by the crowd that was schooled in how to be stupid according to a new infallible method.