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.

Curiosity as an intellectual faculty is a decisive factor in the human capacity for creativity. Although it is often associated with artistic creation, it also plays an important role in scientific research. It is precisely this theme of creativity as a driver of both science and art that the Portuguese astronomer Pedro Russo, professor at the Leiden University in the Netherlands, discusses in this article.

‘Because there is a hidden story on every corner in Paris’. Thus ends this evocation of a city which, like no other, is built on space-time. In his article, the musician and writer Adolfo Luxúria Canibal mixes his own memories with more general ones. While his impressions do not ignore those of others, his personal experience of living in the city for five years lends them an authenticity. The vocalist of the band Mão Morta reminisces about this ‘cosmopolitan and parochial’ city, where living is an art form and reality is never disentangled from the imaginary, and the figure of Isidore Ducasse, the Count of Lautréamot, lurks like a luminescent shadow.

In this ‘Book of Hours’, the renowned South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son speaks of the present and the past in a gesture that joins the world through the musicians that come together to perform. The pandemic traverses this diary as a reminder of the risk it presents to our lives. The concert that the artist cancelled at the last minute is a symbol of frustrated disappointment that she hopes to transform into the joy of hope – the hope that live music, currently silenced, will be heard again one day.

We look back at the 1920s from the 2020s and ask what happened then and what is happening now. Despite major changes, there are similarities that are not analogous but homologous (crises, pandemics, etc.). The American historian Bradley W. Hart, who received the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize in 2019, is a professor at California State University and an expert on this historical period, on which he has published several books. In this essay, he portrays an unstable, contradictory, perilous and fascinating decade when ‘there was no return to normality’ and anything seemed possible.

At what point did we begin referring to education predominantly as an investment, love as a contract, family as a partnership, friendship as a network, and the future as a dividend? When did the naturalisation of this language occur, establishing a relationship to the world on the basis of a transaction according to which experience is defined by returns, and subjectivity by value? An indicator of this profound mutation can be found in the way the word speculation inscribed itself so vehemently and yet so banally in the contemporary imaginary. While current usage has reduced it to something commonplace due to its association with financial markets, deals and scams; the word still carries its centuries of muted meanings, when a speculator meant a mystical prophet, star gazer, mirror maker, or visionary artist. These are the forgotten declinations of the prime category of the era of financial capital, that which defines our political unconscious.

Nathalie Quintane and Olivia Rosenthal are both leading lights of the French literary and artistic scenes. Both were asked to interpret or comment on a phrase by Virginia Woolf that establishes a relationship between the female condition and access to the writing ‘profession’ in tangible terms. The resulting essays affirm Woolf’s relevance in the world we live in today.

* A paper delivered by Virginia Woolf to the Women's Service League, 1932

There are countless discourses today about food and everything that revolves around it. A quintessential anthropological object enshrined in the expression ‘we are what we eat’, food has become a matter of great cultural and social importance that is studied at the highest level and given prominence in the media and publishing industry.

The dossier of this edition of Electra speaks of our age by speaking of food. Food is a global feature of our times, ever present as we strive for goals that always seem out of reach. Food seduces and bewitches, rallies and mobilises, fascinates and even sparks obsession. And, in some parts of the world, it is often in short supply. (...)

The French historian Patrick Rambourg, author of Histoire de la cuisine et de la gastronomie françaises (2010), describes the creation of the restaurant in the 18th century and its evolution. This Parisian institution, which has been exported all around the world, is suffused with the gastronomic mystique of Paris and constitutes a place of refined social interaction and conviviality.