Giving time a number that we use to count and commemorate it, is seeking a continuity that connects the future to the past in this strange, usual place that we call the present. It also means approaching what anthropologists call a symbolic domain or perhaps even a magical order. As we draw closer, we touch that distance in which surrealists saw life and freedom coincide in the myth that eternalises the moment.

Identity is the great political issue of our time, to the point that demands for identity have acquired an important role in the political space where battles are waged. Gender, sexuality, ‘race’, ethnicity, culture and nationality are territories that appeal to a feeling of belonging, whilst at the same time determining a fight for recognition and a consciousness induced by self-recognition. We could say that the political sensitivity centred on the idea of social construction has faded due to a change in the moral sensitivity of individuals. This sharp turn has brought new subjects to the fore and, in symbolic terms, guaranteed equality for women, gays, blacks and other groups similarly marked by a history of humiliation, subordination and exploitation. Around identity issues and the politics that try to address them, flags and barricades are raised, and friends and enemies are formed.

Almeida Faria’s literary oeuvre is made up of different genres and registers, sometimes in the same novel. This is the case of Paixão, the first book in his ‘Lusitanian Tetralogy’, which is almost a polyphonic novel in its complex development of different voices. This time, he has made an incursion into journalling at the invitation of the Electra. The journal that he wrote for this section of the magazine, called ‘Book of Hours’, begins on a triumphant day, 16th June, the Bloomsday that Joyce included in the calendar of modern European literature. Thus, this journal starts as a tribute to literary fiction, to its magnificent deeds (a tribute which continues in an evocation of an important name in European literature, a European writer par excellence, the German Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 118with whom Almeida Faria has a long-standing dialogue). Recording a few days’ stay in Munich, starting with the day of his departure from Lisbon and ending on his return, this journal is also a record of his distancing himself from national matters. In a way, this distancing, which consists of getting away (and by away we mean to a foreign country) and casting a critical, cosmopolitan, look inwards, isa mechanism common to the narrative work of Almeida Faria.

Jean-Christophe Bailly is an essayist, philosopher, poet, playwright and inhabitant of frontiers between genres — a literary and essay-writing nomad. Painting, photography, literature, poetry and architecture — no art form is missing from his work. Having written much about cities and the French landscape (in a book entitled Le Dépaysement, which he defined as being ‘about France’) in this text he writes about very obscure relationships between literature and architecture, between one art on the side of fluidity and impermanence and the other that is all about solidity and tends towards a kind of eternity.

Delhi, India’s fabled capital, has been built, destroyed and rebuilt many times over the centuries. It is a metropolis made up of many cities, but the most captivating is Old Delhi or the Walled City. It is described in this geographical guide, which is also a dictionary of love, with words and images crafted by Mayank Austen Soofi for this View of Delft. Soofi is a well- known Indian writer and photographer. He writes a daily column for the historical Hindustan Times, with a readership of over one million. He also boasts a highly influential presence on social media (website The Delhi Walla, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter). He says, ‘Repeatedly bruised and battered by its violent past, the historic quarter is struggling to adapt itself to the chaos, conflicts, and conveniences of the modern world’.

The images in this portfolio, conceived by Jorge Queiroz for Electra, speak of the revelation and concealment that give them a sense of continuous discovery. A skilled draughtsman and an utterly original painter, the author of O Banho de Arquimedes [Archimedes bath] has had an uncompromising international career, which, unlike others, does not submit to facile and external dictates. With a gaze that encompasses the successive epochs of art history, Jorge Queiroz allows his oeuvre to build a personal contemporaneity that dialogues with the art movements which have shaped our modernity since the late 19th century. His art resorts to certain aspects of science to enact a prestidigitation in which formal imagination and material imagination shadow each other. This portfolio is presented by curator Antonia Gaeta, for whom ‘The oeuvre of Jorge Queiroz is steeped in the conviction that what is loved endures, and that the quest for light is in equal parts narration and portent’.

One of the most prominent philosophers of the twenty-first century and arguably the one most engaged with the issue of change in the world today, Catherine Malabou has covered the most disparate topics in contemporary critical thought, from neuroscience to feminism, from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency, from epigenetic trauma to sexual pleasure. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, Catherine Malabou recalls the journey that culminated in her new book on the political idea of anarchism, the latest variation on the concept that brings together her entire work: plasticity.

Here, Cristina Fernandes interprets and comments on one of the thoughts that Paul Valéry turned into an aphorism. In her writing (which we can read in the ‘Bicho Ruim’ blog that she has with Rui Manuel Amaral and soon in a book entitled C de C) she also cultivates short prose.

In November 1966, Merce Cunningham’s dance company — and alongside the choreographer, his partner, the composer John Cage — came to Portugal for the first time. In those years, the country was ruled by an old dictatorship that left it culturally isolated and anachronistic, but there were people eager for openness and with the desire to disturb this stagnation. In this essay, the dancer, choreographer and editor João dos Santos Martins relates what happened in those surprising nights and how these novel shows were received. Art critics were divided between two opposite kinds of astonishment: one fuelled by incomprehension, the other by admiration. Artists such as Mário Cesariny and Ana Hatherly followed Cunningham and Cage, turning their presence into a manifesto. Among the Lisbon audience was the young Maria Filomena Molder, before she became a philosopher, who watched Cunningham’s choreography with the enthusiasm of someone witnessing a revelation. Alongside its historiographical value, this thorough research documents the awe produced by the unknown and shows how the artistic ruptures and revolutionary creations sent shock waves across the country. These inspired those who welcomed them with eager curiosity and exasperated those who were closed off in a self-sufficient attitude.

In this essay-feature, the musician, programmer and publisher Pedro Gomes talks to four artists associated with creole rap, who tell us stories from the neighbourhoods of the Greater Lisbon area and the South Bank. It also shows us the photos that the photographer Diogo Simões took for Electra. The encounter of words and pictures is accompanied by the rhythms of a music that has recently taken hold. This section also has the collaboration of Otávio Raposo with a brief history of Creole rap. ‘By registering their experiences living in marginalised territories and challenging the subordinate position occupied by the Afro-Portuguese in Portuguese society, these rappers forged a collective identity that served as a shelter in an environment marked by hostile conditions,’ we are told by the anthropologist.

Ivan Nunes, who earned a PhD with his thesis ‘Nanni Moretti as a film-maker and character’, writes about Three Floors, the Italian director’s latest film. It is an article in which the writer not only shows his profound knowledge of the work, but also expresses his own point of view: ‘It might be the first film of old Moretti — and it may well be that, of all his avatars, old Moretti might just be my favourite’.

Natalia Ginzburg was not just an important Italian writer, but also an intellectual who came through times of war and tragedy with a political and cultural commitment and sense of responsibility common to other writers of her generation. The collection of essays in The Little Virtues (a 1962 book that has recently been translated into Portuguese and published by Relógio D'Água) on which Golgona Anghel writes, paints us a picture of the literary, political and family world in which Natalia Ginzburg played such an important role.

In the stock market of feelings, the price of empathy has risen significantly while sympathy is practically junk now – nobody invests in it anymore.