Emmanuel Todd encompasses several disciplines and fields of learning: his vast output is notable for its ambitious range and the originality of his viewpoints and ideas, which have consistently sparked both interest and controversy. Referencing Todd’s books, Bernardo Futscher Pereira provides a portrait of a thinker who looks at geopolitics and the timespan of human history and dares to answer the question: where are we?

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

The theme of this issue of Electra addresses a fundamental feature of our times: there is an empire of numbers in every corner of society and politics that briefs governmental managerial decisions, economic measures, cultural programmes, educational guidelines, and scientific research directives. In short: everything around us is inescapably informed by numbers.

In an age which has been called the ‘empire of the ephemeral’, ephemeral urbanism is today a necessity, a choice and a symptom, calling into question our habitual conceptions of urbanism and revealing resistance, rituals, disasters, dramas and divergence. Felipe Vera, a Chilean architect and curator, a specialist in themes relating to temporary cities, who, with the Indian architect Rahul Mehrotra, took part in the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, talks to us about the other vision of these cities that flow like Heraclitus’ river of time.

In this written interview, Éric Marty addresses some of the compulsory stopping points in his book, Le sexe des Modernes: the consequences of the sex/gender binomial, the ‘trans’ as the figure that disrupts gender theory and the critical dialogue with Judith Butler.

In this review, Afonso Dias Ramos reads four books that reflect on the Covid-19 pandemic and how the world has changed and will continue to do so. He stresses that the books, written by four Portuguese authors with different backgrounds and views, show ‘a rare critical willingness to confront a contemporary event’ and underlines that the current context requires ‘a different kind of writing’.

These days, people everywhere are calling for a type of politics that places ethical requirements at its centre. It is time to question this stitching together of ethics and politics and the misunderstandings and consequences of this claim for the concept of politics. The response to this challenge comes, on the one hand, from Donatella Di Cesare, an Italian philosopher well-known for her books on Heidegger and the Jews (from the German philosopher’s Black Notebooks) and on the ‘philosophy of migration’, and, on the other, from Bruno Peixe Dias, a doctoral student in the area of political philosophy.

The writer recounts the experience of youth in a place that, in his view, is ‘Lisbon’s last suburb’. It is told in the first person and filtered through eyes that have meanwhile acquired the language and analytical tools needed to understand the hatred and cruel laws of a world – ours – full of borders and demarcated territories. It is of paradigmatic value here.
 

Grotesque power, one of the long-standing declensions of political power, has triumphantly re-emerged in our time in the form of figures who act like buffoons, clowns and jesters. This is what writer and journalist Christian Salmon, contributor to some of the most prestigious international newspapers and author of a vast and original body of work on our contemporaneity, discusses in this essay.

Eyal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture, an agency that uses architecture as material evidence, leading independent investigations and partnering with international prosecutors and environmental and human rights groups to find, reconstruct, and expose violence. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, Weizman discusses a decade of working across the boundaries between art and forensic analysis, journalism and the law, with advanced spatial and media investigations into key cases of state and corporate violence around the world.