Jeremy Gilbert is an essayist, specialist in cultural and political theory and lecturer at the University of London. He is also a DJ. On the basis of this famously provocative quotation from Nietzsche, he tells us how matter can be mobile and creative. Linking oriental wisdom and western science, the ‘god that dances’ can be a good vantage point for looking at our times, these times of ‘great celebration’ everywhere, every hour and every minute, with their multiplicities and complexities.

In this text, occasionally drawing on examples from the ‘Spanish political laboratory’, Félix Duque undertakes a critical analysis of ‘identitarianism’, a term the Spanish philosopher uses to refer to the mystical and essentialist belief in identity responsible for two current political phenomena: populism and national populism.

The topic addressed in the ‘Subject’ section of this issue of Electra finds at its centre a concept that in the last three decades has gained significant traction in the social, cultural and political realms ‒ as an engine and instrument of movements for equality ‒ and in the theories produced primarily by the various fields of cultural studies.

Identity is the great political issue of our time, to the point that demands for identity have acquired an important role in the political space where battles are waged. Gender, sexuality, ‘race’, ethnicity, culture and nationality are territories that appeal to a feeling of belonging, whilst at the same time determining a fight for recognition and a consciousness induced by self-recognition. We could say that the political sensitivity centred on the idea of social construction has faded due to a change in the moral sensitivity of individuals. This sharp turn has brought new subjects to the fore and, in symbolic terms, guaranteed equality for women, gays, blacks and other groups similarly marked by a history of humiliation, subordination and exploitation. Around identity issues and the politics that try to address them, flags and barricades are raised, and friends and enemies are formed.

If we define the idiot considering the etymological meaning of the word, we find an association with identity and the claim for the private, identity and a rootedness that create hostility towards everything that comes from outside. The rejection of migrants and refugees, who arrive in Europe fleeing war, terrorism, and catastrophes, is fed by a fear mechanism with the attributes of idiocy.

At the long border that separates the real from the fantastical, at that long border inscribed in the soil by the feet of those who daily patrol it, there is a diffuse zone, a zone lacking in discernment, a particularly hybrid zone, that goes by the name of Imagination.

Rita Azevedo Gomes’ cinematographic oeuvre is a meeting place for literature and cinema. She worked with Agustina Bessa-Luís on a number of occasions. The last was on the film A Portuguesa [The Portuguese], which was based on a short story of the same name by Robert Musil, with dialogues written by Agustina Bessa-Luís. In this ‘Register’ the film director and screenwriter evokes the rich life and approach to death of the writer of A Sibila [The Sybil]. ‘And now, it is in a state somewhere between fervour and panic that I am writing here, following only my own memories, in my search for Agustina.’ As Rita recalls what she found in her and heard from her, she paints us a personal portrait of this exceptional author and her ‘infinite writing, this blanket that covers and discovers us all’.

At the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris, curated by Helena de Freitas, a new exhibition places the work of Rui Chafes and Alberto Giacometti side by side and head to head. The magnetic force of attraction between the two bodies of work is clear to the viewer, in what brings them together and what keeps them apart. Nicolao Federico, writer, philosopher and curator, is familiar with the work of both Giacometti and Chafes and writes about the artists and the exhibition in which they come together.

In this ‘View’, the Greek author Nikos Pratsinis writes about Heraklion, the capital of Crete, the island of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. Here we find past and present, gods and humans, land and sea, mythology and poetry, history and geography, architecture and cuisine and personal and cultural memories. Pratsinis is a writer and translator. He lived in Portugal for a few years and, together with the poet Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, translated the prose and poems of Konstandinos Kavafis and selected poems by Yorgos Seferis into Portuguese.

The work of Álvaro Lapa (Évora, 1939 – Porto, 2006) developed, within the context of the Portugal of the 1960s, at the margins of the dominant cultural references, declining an alternative culture (one deriving from the whole historical inheritance – from the Romantic to the Surrealist movements — and the concrete work of the Beat Generation).