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.

Lourdes Castro was born in 1930, in Funchal, Portugal, and her origins are present in her work like a watermark. She studied Painting at Lisbon’s School of Fine Arts (1950–1956). She lived in Munich for some time and, in 1958, she moved to Paris. In 1983, she went back to the island of Madeira, where she currently lives.

The Lourdes Castro exhibition at Musée régional d’art contemporain Occitanie in France was curated by Anne Bonnin. It was a revelation and was ‘greeted with amazement and enthusiasm’. This is what João Pinharanda tells us in his comments and critique. Starting from the exhibition and its itinerary, this curator and art historian opens up new perspectives in the way we look at such original, subtle, absorbing and fleeting work. Made of light and shadow, it seems to be suspended in space and time. Or rather, suspended between space and time. It is this eternity of the moment that makes its contemporaneity a fascinating visual enigma and an engaging poetic mystery.