Idleness, leisure, work, free time, entertainment: these concepts and figures, around which the themed dossier presented here is built, form a constellation inhabited by many tensions which have been given a certain movement by our time. There are oppositions that have disappeared or been replaced by others; there are expansions and triumphant positions, which is the case of leisure, as would be expected in a society that has placed work at its centre and expelled idleness, like someone who eradicates a vice or an evil. Currently, activities that were the offspring of idleness (arts, literature, sciences, philosophy, etc.) have been assimilated into work and thus fall under its regime. Our relationship with accelerated time and the triumph of the merchandised form, to the point where leisure itself has been totally captured, largely determine the types of leisure and its status in our time. At the same time, programmed compulsory entertainment has monopolised extensive swathes of culture and become a task which extends those that fall under the category of work. All this is proof that the boundaries between some of these entities have dissolved, or at least weakened.

André Barata, professor at the University of Beira Interior and author of several essays that reflect on the production of meaning and the transformations that mark our time, begins this article with the observation that the boundaries between work and leisure have dissolved. In the end, he reaches the conclusion that, in our time, idleness is rejected.

Lies have a history filled with possibilities. For this reason, we should not limit ourselves to the simple opposition between truth and lies, as if there were no subtle (and apparently paradoxical) modalities, such as the truth of lies and the lies of truth. In this history, the relationship between lies and politics has always been extremely important. We do not even have to evoke machiavellianism to understand that the bond between one and the other has an almost consubstantial nature. In our time, marked by the communication and dissemination of mass messages in a horizontal, rhizomatic public space, lies have entered a new regime, of which fake news is the extreme example. The notion of ‘post-truth’ (considered word of the year in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary) emerged as a strange designation, which many thought was simply a new name for an old reality. But it is something else: post-truth is beyond true and false, dissolving the difference between these two poles. Therefore, it cannot be nullified by a rebuttal. This dossier of Electra does not only address these issues, however. It also examines other obligatory topics, such as art, fiction, delirium, and the powers of technology.

Bárbara Reis, a renowned journalist for Público newspaper, where she was once editor, brings together two impressive testimonies from Brazilian women who tell us what they went through from the moment they found themselves persecuted by ‘digital militias’ that spread lies about them and made death threats.

A painter comments on the words of another painter. At the end of his life, no longer able to paint, Paul Gauguin devoted himself to writing as a means of providing an intimate and autobiographical perspective in his search for self-knowledge and his desire to question a complex identity. From this exercise, to which he dedicated himself tardily but intensely, emerged a sentence that offers a disenchanted assessment of life. The painter João Queiroz discusses it here.

As we look at time in an endeavour to understand it, we also need to listen to it. The voices, screams, murmurs, words, phraseology and silences of each span of time tell us what time it is.

The commonplaces and fixed ideas in the words spoken and voices heard are highly revealing, symptomatic and informative. They are a guiding line of shadow in a maze of light. It was not by chance that Gustave Flaubert regarded them with tireless diligence. His Dictionnaire des idées reçues was a manual of ethology

In a text for the editor of Electra, António Guerreiro, the French essayist and professor of contemporary literature Lionel Ruffel explores Baudelaire’s Curiosités esthétiques [Aesthetic Curiosities], and through them arrives at ‘literary curiosities’, or gender-neutral ‘alternative’ – i.e. ‘queer’ – literature.

With the title ‘Autobiography and the Novel’, published in Languages of Truth, the British writer of Indian origin Salman Rushdie wrote an essay in which intelligence and malice play off each other prompting an inquiry and raising questions that come close to the ones tackled in the ‘Subject’ section of this issue of Electra. The latter also highlights and echoes the confusion that envelops these questions today, swelling like a powerful vortex.

The author of Doutor Fausto and Ensaio Sobre o Termo da História, among other books and essays, looks at Living Currency by Pierre Klossowski. It is a heterodox essay on the conversion of all libidinal force into a commodity and the resulting social organisation. Klossowski establishes a degree of equivalence between the libidinal economy and the economy of material goods and sheds light on the extreme logic of money and its life, which captures all lives.

Divided (or multiplied) between Lisbon and Trás‑os-Montes, between the city and the countryside, over the years, the painter Graça Morais has kept an intermittent diary, where she records, in images and words, her impressions and reflections on what she sees and experiences. In this diary, she draws the fruits of the earth, animal figures, human faces and victims of war, accompanying those visual notes with direct and quick verbal commentary. In this ‘Book of Hours’, which corresponds to different times, a few unpublished pages of the artist’s diary are revealed. Running alongside a vast and renowned work, they develop a discontinuous, yet endlessly illuminating dialogue.