It was as if speed, which was the subject that had been planned and announced long ago for this edition, had morphed into the image of our perplexity and blended into the measure of our distance from things. This edition of Electra was ready to go to print when life changed completely. Suddenly spaces closed and time turned about face, pulling tomorrow into today and slowly leading today into tomorrow.

This question was raised after the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded, rather controversially, to Peter Handke, who publicly defended the former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. In this section, two authors give us their response: the critic, essayist and translator João Barrento, and the writer and director of the French journal Lignes, Michel Surya. João Barrento reviews a series of problematic ‘cases’ in the art and literature of the twentieth century to demonstrate the complexity of the issue and the different answers that he has obtained; Michel Surya asserts quite radically that great literature, ever the subject of scandal, knows no limits.

In this interview, Vandana Shiva, one of the most well-known environmental activists of our time, speaks of her work in support of organic agriculture, both in her home country, India, and on a global level. The main topics addressed are the indispensable role of women in a caring, human and ecological economy, and the need for us to resist the distortion of the original meanings of words in the language of the market and colonization.

Among the many names that have been used to describe the society in which we live, a matter that also involves issues within the realms of theory (the society of the spectacle, society of simulacra, risk society, etc.), there might be yet another very important name: the society of speed and acceleration. The technical acceleration of modernity, which in recent times has reached a state of paroxysm at the limit of the speed of light thanks to information and digital technologies, has become the most decisive phenomenon not only in social and cultural change but also in the way we live our lives. The experience of time, as marked by acceleration, has become a vertiginous spiral. Everything, from the circulation of money to information, from work rules to leisure activities, takes place at a speed that is increasing relentlessly. This has led to two emblematic diseases of our time. One, burnout, is physical and psychological and the other is socio-political in nature and bears an old name in new clothes, alienation. Appeals have been made to slow down, for the sake of our health and that of our planet. But it was not these appeals that caused a spectacular break in this movement that everyone believed to be irreversible unless there were some kind of natural catastrophe. The slowdown has come in the guise of a virus that has spread all over the world. It was enough for us to experience in practice what we already knew in theory: in the world that we live in, reducing speed brings everything falling down round our ears. Because speed is a total social phenomenon, we have chosen it as the ‘Subject’ for this edition of Electra.

In one of his diaries, Kafka warned, ‘You don’t need to leave your room. Stay sitting at your desks and listen. You don’t even need to listen; just wait. You don’t need to wait; just stay still, silent, alone. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.’ The two diaries that we have published in this edition are by the photographer Daniel Blaufuks and the visual artist Mariana Silva. They are about the lockdown that has been imposed on us by the Covid-19 pandemic. They are based on two places on lockdown in a world held prisoner by the virus and fear: near Lisbon for him; New York for her. In these two ‘Books of Hours’, Blaufuks and Silva look at the world through a window that looks from outside in. But this window was not presented to them on a platter. They were the ones that opened it with a look that thinks, sees, speaks. Was it not also Kafka who said, ‘Man does not grow upwards, but from inside out.’?

This is the portrait of a great twentieth-century political leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who played a decisive role in the implosion of the East European communist regimes, with consequences that Europe and the world know well. The picture that William Taubman draws here combines his political career with the history of a personal life that makes him a distinctive personality.

A painter comments on the words of another painter. At the end of his life, no longer able to paint, Paul Gauguin devoted himself to writing as a means of providing an intimate and autobiographical perspective in his search for self-knowledge and his desire to question a complex identity. From this exercise, to which he dedicated himself tardily but intensely, emerged a sentence that offers a disenchanted assessment of life. The painter João Queiroz discusses it here.

Our cities are increasingly acoustic cities. The most immense or most intimate public spaces are stages on which sound is one of the actors. John Bingham-Hall is the director of Theatrum Mundi, which was founded by the great sociologist and urbanist Richard Sennett. He works with Gascia Ouzounian, co-director of Recomposing the City, on the Acoustic Cities project. In this Metropolitan section, they talk about their work and the basic topics of sonic urbanism, including sonic citizenship, sonic archaeology and ‘sonic justice as a right to access to quiet or indeed to make noise’. A new way of hearing the city that underlies a new way of seeing the city.

Stefan Kürten is a well-reputed German artist whose work has been shown in art galleries and institutions in Europe and the USA. He was professor for painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is currently guest professor at the School of Art and Design, Alfred University, New York. In this portfolio, especially created for Electra, he develops some of the themes and motifs most represented in his work. The respected curator and critic Gregor Jansen, director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, wrote the following essay expressly to accompany this artwork. He speaks of the inspiration that Kürten’s work finds in cinema, of the strange relationship between architecture, innocence and terror – and, also, of the images, and the stories that we derive from them.

Jocelyne Saab was a French-Lebanese filmmaker, active from 1970 to 2019. Since she died on January 7th, 2019, her work has been (re)discovered by the younger generation of Lebanese, Arab and international filmmakers that claim their affiliation with this audacious form of political cinema. A witness of her time, Jocelyne Saab made films that wrote another history of the last 30 years of the 20th century in the Middle East.

Under this title, Jay Pather, a choreographer, curator, and associate professor at the University of Cape Town, opens the way for a visit to the city – ‘topographically this was where apartheid was created’ – where ‘hauntings, irony and paradox abound everywhere’. From the initial exhilaration of the Mandela era to its melting away, an effort is now being made to use art as a form of energy for the ‘wresting of these hauntings’.

The writer Gonçalo M. Tavares and the artist-architect collective ‘Os Espacialistas’ [The Spacialists] devote themselves to the pursuit of utopian architectures. They put forward the concept of ‘human machines’, which do not work by necessity or routine but rather by the imagination of the body. This notion, which is distinctly present in the work of both, will be presented in the next two issues of Electra. With this work and this form of publication, we are inaugurating a new section in the magazine – ‘Serial’ – with which we return to the old editorial tradition of securing the readers’ loyalty with the thread of a story told over successive instalments.

The Brazilian essayist and novelist Silviano Santiago, a great specialist in the work of Guimarães Rosa, writes about the Portuguese edition of Grande Sertão: Veredas, an uncommon and ‘monstrous’ novel that has challenged generations of readers and scholars with an endless task. It is published in English under the title The Devil to Pay in the Backlands.

Among the most original works of queer theory is this Countersexual Manifesto, which appeared twenty years ago, signed by Beatriz Preciado, and now has Paul B. Preciado as its author. Preciado is a Spanish transgender philosopher, an exceptional figure, where queer theory and practice combine in a single movement.

In classical Marxist theory, surplus value is defined as the difference between the value of the product of labour and the remuneration that is sufficient to support labour power – a difference that in capitalist regimes is appropriated by capitalist entrepreneurs.In this context, labour is considered a commodity. In actual fact, looked at more closely, labour is not a commodity in Marx’s view, but rather the use value of the unique commodity that is labour power.