The Italian historian Enzo Traverso, a professor at Cornell University, is the author of important books on the Holocaust and on twentieth-century political ideas. In this text, he describes and analyses a transition that, from his point of view, marks the end of the twentieth century: the utopias gave place to the cult of memory, which led to the proliferation of ‘remembrance’ and set the melancholy tone that characterises the spirit of our times.

Taking Borges’ famous short story ‘Funes, the Memorious’ as her starting point, Carla Ganito, a lecturer in the Faculty of Human Sciences at the Catholic University, Lisbon, analyses the complex dialectics between memory and forgetfulness in the digital age. She shows that the internet has brought a new but paradoxical condition that consists of making memories permanent, in taking away the right to be forgotten, at the same time as it transforms us into amnesiacs.

Quoting four passages and using them as four separate starting points – an excerpt from a Borges tale, another from Frances A. Yates’ The Art of Memory, Rimbaud’s poem ‘Voyelles’, and a series of excerpts from St Augustine’s Confessions – Maria Filomena Molder follows a winding path through the question of the force of memory and the forms and instruments of mnemotechnics.

Catherine Millet is a writer, a curator and the editor of the magazine Art Press, of which she was the founder. In 1968, she began as an art critic for the cultural weekly Lettres Françaises, under the editorship of Louis Aragon. It is one of this writer’s passages that Millet has selected for comment, making it a lever with which she raises her world. On the basis of the quotation from Aragon, whose lack of verbal propriety causes an erotic thrill, Millet – the author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M., the book that made her name among the general public – provocatively declares her infallibly controversial ideas on women and their relationship with men. In her commentary, Millet carries on a controversy marked by violent anathemas and virulent accusations, with echoes that are still present.

Abdellah Taïa is a Moroccan writer who has lived in Paris for twenty years. However, his vision of the Arab world, as he expresses it in his novels and in public, is not that of someone looking from a distance but of someone seeing from within. And on the basis of this meaningful familial and social experience of Morocco, he tries to destroy clichés, portraying a world that does not fit exactly with the way the West constructs it.

A free, democratic and developed society should, in principle, allow public declarations of all kinds. There is no censorship – or there should not be any – and every citizen is therefore free to voice, and is responsible for voicing, their opinions on social and political matters. However, if these opinions are offensive or incite hatred, violence or discrimination against a specific social group for their race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc., are the people expressing them criminally liable? The Criminal Code in my country states that they are. We are governed by the rule of law, so I will not dispute this fact. Such opinions are a crime and that is a simple fact. I will focus instead on what is wrong with these opinions.

At the beginning, it is never the verb, always the question mark. We do it the correct way, using the right methodology. First we state the question. When is expressing an opinion a crime? Let me start by saying that freedom of expression, in the sense used by João Bénard da Costa in his book Muito Lá de Casa [A Very Domestic Issue] (a collection of articles about his beloved cinema), is, and has always been, ‘a very domestic issue’ as far as I am concerned. One of the above articles, ‘O Problema da Habitação’ [‘The Problem with Housing’], he ended with the following: ‘As Rui Belo wrote, “A house is the most serious thing in life.” And being closely attached to it is also very serious.’ Now let me move on to analysing the question I was asked, affirming my deep attachment to freedom of expression, in the sense set out in our constitution (and, one underlines, in the part relating to fundamental rights and duties), i.e., that everyone has the right to express and freely divulge their opinion through word, image or any other means, and the exercising of this right cannot be limited by any form of censorship. Without freedom of expression, the democratic, liberal and pluralistic state does not exist; in sum, open society, in its best and most fruitful sense, is non-existent.

Electra challenged the highly-esteemed Brazilian writer, essayist and university lecturer, Silviano Santiago, to keep a diary for a period of time. In a serene and subtly disenchanted tone, he recorded certain points in his day-to-day life – actions, meetings, reflections, renewed visits to literary works – blending them with the tense political and cultural life of Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

‘Scoop’ is a new section of Electra that allows authors to unveil original, unpublished work. In this first ‘Scoop’, the highly-esteemed Indian photographer, painter and director Sarah Singh, who lives between India and New York, presents her next film, Alexandra, in words and images. She began to imagine this film, a ‘work in progress’, twelve years ago and is shooting it now. Alexandra, the feminine form of Alexander, symbolises the great undertaking of a woman director who wants to connect the distant past with the present.

Havana is celebrating the quincentenary of its foundation. For many, the city represents easy enjoyment, a flight from time, a mirage in the sea, music that never ends. The Cuban writer and journalist Carlos Manuel Álvarez, a regular contributor to newspapers such as The New York Times and El Pais lives outside Cuba. For him, when he went back to his city to enjoy himself, Havana had returned to being ‘a city full of untethered sadnesses’. He says, in addition, ‘The day in Cuba is still communist, but the night is ever more neoliberal. ’The evocation of Havana that he creates here is pervaded by an exuberant and melancholy memory and permeated by a wind that disperses the waves breaking against the Malecón seawall.