Nick Cave sings: Goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil. With this, he seems to have put his life and his work into words.

At the end of his life, Barthes wrote a sentence that shows some scepticism towards modern literature, whose most radical experiments he had always adhered to or at least taken an interest in. Éric Marty, editor of the complete works of Roland Barthes, comments on this sentence and explains the context within which it was born.

Céline’s anti-Semitic pamphlets — written between 1937-1941 and forbidden since the end of World War Two — aroused once again a violent polemic at the end of last year, when Gallimard announced it was going to republish them in a critical edition and, soon after, following some of the public reactions, gave up 100 diagonals on the project. On this controversial issue, we publish here the differing views of two authoritative voices on the matter: Pierre-André Taguieff, author of a remarkable essay on Céline’s anti-Semitism, and Serge Klarsfeld, one of the great activists in France for the rights of deported Jews.

A retrospective of the work of Álvaro Lapa at the Serralves Museum showed us very clearly a complex and unique artist in the landscape of 20^th-century Portuguese art — an artist establishing a dense, productive dialogue with other disciplinary fields such as literature and philosophy. Reason enough for two different critical approaches: one by José Gil, the other by João Pinharanda.

Every day, we read headlines in newspapers and magazines such as: Celebrities go on holiday to paradise destinations; Celebrity lets her hair down at wild party and reveals more than she meant to...; Celebrities organise charity event for children in need; Celebrity launches her own cosmetics brand. It is not the holidays or parties, charities or businesses that these headlines are about, but the celebrities involved. They are the point and purpose.

Journalist and writer Cristina Battocletti is the author of a biography of Robert Bazlen (1902–1965) that paints a portrait of this cosmopolitan native of Trieste, who made a major contribution to ensuring the publication of Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience. Bazlen was a cult figure who founded the publishing house Adelphi, and was also a translator and a writer, although little of his work was published during his lifetime.

Trieste, a border city and cultural crossroads, a port in Habsburgian Mitteleuropa, and the cradle of an extraordinarily rich cultural and literary environment, is revisited here by someone intimately familiar with its brilliant arts scene.

The Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, an eminent figure in post-colonial and ‘subaltern studies’, author of Provincializing Europe – a book that has had widespread international repercussions, and currently a professor at the University of Chicago, is interviewed by the historians José Neves and Marcos Cardão.

In this section, we show unpublished work by one of the most highly regarded photographers working today: Jo Ractliffe. This South African artist, whose career dates back thirty-five years, is included in the collections of some of the world’s major art institutions, such as MoMA and the Met (New York), the Tate Modern (London) and the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam). To mark her new retrospective (Drives) at the renowned Art Institute of Chicago, we reveal some never before seen photos that Ractliffe took in Angola, shot at places such as the port of Luanda, the Boavista neighbourhood and the Roque Santeiro Market. What attracted her was to see ‘how people were making their way in this wild chaotic sprawl of a city, full of post-war energy and enterprise and the contradictory promise of a new future’. Afonso Dias Ramos presents this important contemporary artist and her work for Electra in an essay written especially for this issue.

This chronicle by Fernando Pessoa about celebrity is both a philosophical meditation and a code of ethics. In his essay, whose title Vanitas is taken from Ecclesiastes, the poet Manuel de Freitas uses Pessoa’s text to make a claim about our age: ‘We live in a time when celebrity is almost invariably based on aesthetic misconceptions or crass promotional campaigns.’ ‘As for myself,’ he asserts, ‘now that I am a bit older than Fernando Pessoa, I am quite happy with the one or two hundred readers that closely follow my every book.’