Beginnings still exist. Electra began a year ago and since then we have published five issues of this magazine dedicated to thought, art, literature, science and cul-tural criticism. Each one is a stroke that gradually draws the full face. This face is moveable and mutable, made of positions and oppositions, juxtapositions and superimpositions. It reveals itself in plural planes and variable geometries. It has diverse and complementary points of view. The more it changes and moves, the more it defines and affirms itself.

The work of the Italian sociologist Alessandro Dal Lago includes a contentious book entitled Genocidi animali (2018). Written with two friends, Massimo Filippi and Antonio Volpe, the slim volume caused controversy for using the word ‘genocide’. This article, beginning with a biographical narrative, looks at the “history of philosophers’ indifference towards the animal world”.
 
 

The Picoas Tower, designed by architects Patrícia Barbas and Diogo Seixas Lopes, demands the resumption of an insistent debate on the history of skyscrapers, their problematic relationship with the city, and what they represent in urban policies.

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.

Afonso Dias Ramos writes about the recent release in France of an unpublished course on the relationship between painting and philosophy given by Gilles Deleuze in 1981, after moving to the University of Saint-Denis. This is an editorial milestone, rendering available to the public the French philosopher’s legendary weekly lectures from 1970 to 1987, which, up until now, had only been shared as audio recordings.

Recognised worldwide and represented in the most important art collections, the Italian artist Giorgio Griffa has selected a representative series of his recent works for this Portfolio section of Electra. Considered one of the most radical, eloquent and effective artists of our time, his work, which is already of historical importance, evidences a poetics that combines an original concept of art, an open personal language and a subtle precision of artistic practice. In an essay written for this edition, Francesco Manacorda, an Italian curator who lives and works in London, presents Griffa's work and reflects on the creative process, deciphering its rich cultural significance. Manacorda's text analyses the ‘fine group assembled here for Electra magazine’.

This is the portrait of a great twentieth-century political leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who played a decisive role in the implosion of the East European communist regimes, with consequences that Europe and the world know well. The picture that William Taubman draws here combines his political career with the history of a personal life that makes him a distinctive personality.

Alain Supiot is a professor at the University of Nantes and the Collège de France. He is the author of La gouvernance par les nombres, 2015 [Governance by Numbers, The Making of a Legal Model of allegiance, 2017]. In this article he looks at the long history of governance by law up until the current system of government that is guided by quantification and by numbers – not only in economic terms but also in a social dimension. It is market globalisation and its immanent neoliberal principles that determine the hegemony of numbers in the information age.

Yves Michaud is a prominent author of books on aesthetics, art criticism and political philosophy and has played an important role in public discussions and controversies about contemporary art in France. In this article, he addresses the issue and challenges that art is facing in this age of generalised aestheticisation and puts forward the idea of ‘Protected Aesthetic Zones’ as a fundamental and critical concept in his analysis.

Goddess of goddesses, sphinx of sphinxes, mystery of mysteries, Madame Grès shone brightly in the exclusive world of Parisian haute couture. Her legacy was her ceaseless quest for absolute beauty in her designs. Her long, draped dresses crafted with obsession and technical mastery are a profound reflection on fashion, time and memory. Anabela Becho, a fashion curator and researcher, describes the life and work of this great couturière.