In this issue, we publish the second instalment of three from the serial story ‘Human Machines’ by the writer Gonçalo M. Tavares and the group of artist-architects Os Espacialistas. These ‘human machines’ ‘create imaginary situations’, informing us, ‘When we fall asleep, all is not sleep or dreams’. They also speak of a God that ‘may be that which exists between the stones’.

This is the third and final instalment of Human Machines. Over three episodes, Gonçalo M. Tavares and Os Espacialistas created ‘imaginary situations’. ‘This simple machine,’ he says, ‘tries to mark the limits of a body’s shadow,’ before adding that ‘Only once does the Shadow Manipulation Machine collapse completely. This is in death. One suddenly loses one’s feet, one’s shadow, and the position of the old circumference of the world.’ This text is thus both strange and very familiar at the same time.

On the centenary of the death of Marcel Proust, in a new essay written for Electra, renowned specialist Jean-Marc Quaranta shows how the work of the great French writer and all the investigations he has generated force us to see his life through other eyes, changing the very literary status of the author. It is, therefore, an authentic and original ‘reincarnation’. Jean-Marc Quaranta is a university professor and member of the Proust team. He is the author of Un amour de Proust. Alfred Agostinelli (1888-1914) and it was he who prepared, established, presented and annotated the edition of the novel Le Temps Perdu, which constituted a first version of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, published for the very first time in 2021.

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.

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.