There are lives that are so secretive and elusive that they are always confused with the shock of their end. There are works that are so secret and inexhaustible that they are always heading for the surprise of their beginning.

Lies have a history filled with possibilities. For this reason, we should not limit ourselves to the simple opposition between truth and lies, as if there were no subtle (and apparently paradoxical) modalities, such as the truth of lies and the lies of truth. In this history, the relationship between lies and politics has always been extremely important. We do not even have to evoke machiavellianism to understand that the bond between one and the other has an almost consubstantial nature. In our time, marked by the communication and dissemination of mass messages in a horizontal, rhizomatic public space, lies have entered a new regime, of which fake news is the extreme example. The notion of ‘post-truth’ (considered word of the year in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary) emerged as a strange designation, which many thought was simply a new name for an old reality. But it is something else: post-truth is beyond true and false, dissolving the difference between these two poles. Therefore, it cannot be nullified by a rebuttal. This dossier of Electra does not only address these issues, however. It also examines other obligatory topics, such as art, fiction, delirium, and the powers of technology.

Ever since her childhood and throughout her near century-long life, the great American painter Georgia O'Keeffe turned the way she dressed her body into an affirmation of herself, both as a woman and a modern artist. She used the same originality and stylistic imagination to create her wardrobe as she used to create her paintings, leaving us a corpus of dresses of her own design or choice. A knowledge of these is fundamental to understanding the artist in her various dimensions, and her time in its various transformations and ruptures. ‘Her meticulous choice of clothes and the way she posed prove that she clearly knew the image she wanted to project and immortalise’ says the author of this essay, Anabela Becho, fashion historian, curator and researcher.

Simon Critchley, one of the most prolific and popular philosophers of the last decades, talks to Electra about some of the varied topics that have been guiding his work, from the role of philosophy in contemporary society to the disillusionment with liberal democracy, the cultural importance of football, and the challenges of autobiographical writing.

A provocative statement by the famous Spanish food critic Rafael García Santos, often referred to as ‘the most feared critic’, is commented on here by Alexandra Prado Coelho, a journalist who specialises in the areas of food and gastronomy, and also by Gianfranco Marrone, professor and director of the International Center for Semiotic Sciences in Urbino and author of works on the semiology of taste and flavour.

To mark the centenary of Franz Kafka's death (b. 03.07.1883 – d. 03.06.1924), Electra is publishing three articles on the Czech writer: one by Gianluca Cuozzo, professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin, on representations of bureaucracy and the exercise of power, or, to put it another way, everything that gave rise to the adjective ‘kafkaesque’, which has now come into common usage; another article by António Guerreiro centred on biographical issues, drawing on the monumental three-volume biography of Kafka by the German author Reiner Stach; and finally, an article by Jacques Le Rider, a French Germanist and renowned scholar of Central European literature and culture, who writes about Kafka's bilingualism, his relationship with the German and Czech languages, and the historical and linguistic background of Prague.

This ‘View of Delft’ seems like a film set in Seville during the famous Holy Week. As the author, Marta G. Franco, a specialist in contemporary communication, tells us: there are 'seventy-two processions, from Friday of Sorrows until Easter Sunday, because Semana Santa in Seville is excessive even in the number of days it lasts.' As we read, through the text we are able to see the processions and everything that happens around them. These rituals, which fulfil age-old traditions, at the same time make use of the latest resources such as new technologies. As Marta G. Franco reminds us they are all participating in a work of street theatre, each with a role.

This portfolio by João Penalva, an artist widely renowned for works that combine video, installation, photography, music, performance, text and image, showcases a number of unpublished pictures: a series of black-and-white photographs taken during his walks across London, in a way that visually resembles the painted canvases of Abstract Expressionism, as the art historian Afonso Dias Ramos comments in the accompanying essay.

The work of Italian sociologist Vania Baldi, author of Otimizados e Desencontrados. Ética e Crítica na Era da Inconsciência Artificial [Optimised and Disconnected. Ethics and Criticism in the Era of Artificial Unconsciousness] draws on the philosophy and anthropology of technology. In this article, he challenges the unrestricted belief, blind optimism, and ethical negligence regarding the new systems of Artificial Intelligence.

José Marmeleira, art critic and professor at the School of Arts and Design (Caldas da Rainha), writes about a recent book by Hal Foster, who is one of the most important critics and historians of North American art, a member of October magazine, and already interviewed in Electra (issue 22, Autumn 2023). This book questions the art-criticism binomial.

In the past, this was the quintessential scholar, the philologist, the exegete. They all deciphered and interpreted ancient, obscure, or highly specialised texts. The Bible is certainly the text that has garnered the most commentators and commentaries to this day. There are also countless ancient books self-described as commentarii, a denomination that immediately placed them within a genre, with rules as specific as a grammar. This tradition has reached our times completely ‘secularised’, in the form of text commentary, an exercise that turns reading and the interpretation of literary texts into a classic, although endangered, goal of the school and university systems.