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.

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.

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.

The last volume of War and Peace was published in 1869, that is, 150 years ago. It is one of the great universal novels. A book for a varied reading public, this epic of Russian literature, a Matryoshka novel with many subplots within, was challenged from the outset. It has a full history, recounted here by Dan Ungurianu, a professor of Russian studies in New York. What he asks here is a persistent question: why is it so difficult to argue against War and Peace? In response, Ungurianu speaks of the book and its author, drawing a lively and precise portrait of Tolstoy.

An obsession with memory, a memory wave, a memory culture: these describe a current phenomenon that consists of the hypertrophy of memory, with manifestations that are cultural, social and political. The concept linked to individual psychology – personal memory, which we have known is uncertain and vulnerable to unconscious detours, at least since Freud – has been transferred to the collective plane and expanded as a viscous and extremely appealing matter. To such an extent that ‘memory’ has become a master-signifier of our time – a time that is subjected to the regime of the present, to what the historian François Hartog calls ‘presentism’. (On the question of memory, as it has been made the main topic of this issue of Electra, the theoretical contributions of this French historian to the ‘regimes of historicity’ are very important: for that reason, we conducted an interview with him, which we include here). But, even though our time is dominated by the historical category of the present, it is simultaneously obsessed with the past.

François Hartog is a professor of Greek and modern historiography at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He is a historian who has also undertaken a substantial amount of important theoretic reflection on basic issues of historiography and the different ways of experiencing time that define each age. The thinking of history as a discipline and the actual concept of history are important contributions that Hartog has made and that extend to the entire field of human sciences.

Bernd Stiegler is an important media theorist and historian, and the author of various books on photography; he teaches at the University of Constanz. In this text, he traces the history of a progressive twentieth-century rediscovery: doomed to oblivion until quite late on, photography has now become a cultural good, and the conservation of photographic heritage has become an obligation.