In this interview, the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich, author of Ce que n’est pas l’identité, defends ‘universalism’ against the specificities of identity. Her public opinions have involved her in huge controversies. They can be explained by the way in which these issues, which were regarded for a long time by French intellectuals as a nefarious product of studies by American universities, have recently ignited a veritable ‘civil war’.

The territory of modern and contemporary art today is dominated by institutions that engage in the symbolic transfer of a new ‘aura’ of art to luxury products and vice-versa. The result is the colossal circulation of money around the works and artists involved in speculation on inflated products.

Breaking down the identity programme that dominates the world, making the counter-current criticism of the identity beliefs and prejudices that exclude difference and rule out otherness – these are the ideas in this article by the philosopher Frédéric Neyrat, a lecturer in comparative literature at University of Winscon – Madison and author of L’ange noir de l’histoire – Cosmos et technique de l’afrofuturisme.

It just so happens that sometimes we can’t find the right words, despite knowing where they are: on the tip of the tongue. It seems easy enough to recover those concealed, as, in a manner of speaking, they’re relatively to hand, but uncovering their lair isn’t enough to untangle the knot of forgotten words that memory has left behind. As for me? In the mirror, I’ve watched myself repeating new-normal, truly a concept old enough to know better. I could, and should, ignore these facts of my inner life, and I will do just that. Especially because behind this printed text there is another one that is brighter, which will never see the light of ink on paper, the light of this time tunnel in which we find ourselves – derived from the Latin novum, in the case of something new or never seen before, and normalis, the state of normality, or uneventful routine.

At its origin, the world wide web gave rise to a naïve dream — the utopia of a digital public space that would fulfil all the promises implicit in the modern conception of public space. But the outcome today is clearly a different one; instead of the promised digital paradise, the winners have been chaos and the discourse of stupidity in its most violent and regressive forms, as the example of an image board called 4chan eloquently shows us.

Gregory Sholette, an American artist and art critic has devoted the lion’s share of his theoretical work to the relationship between art and politics. He writes very critically here about NFTs (non‑fungible tokens), a digital innovation that is undermining the art market and creating some strange phenomena.

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.

The Italian philosopher Francesco Masci, who is based in France, develops a radical idea in this article: that entertainment is much more than an aspect of current culture, that it is ‘the most advanced stage of absolute culture’, the phenomenon that organises all dimensions of modern society.

Jean-Christophe Bailly is an essayist, philosopher, poet, playwright and inhabitant of frontiers between genres — a literary and essay-writing nomad. Painting, photography, literature, poetry and architecture — no art form is missing from his work. Having written much about cities and the French landscape (in a book entitled Le Dépaysement, which he defined as being ‘about France’) in this text he writes about very obscure relationships between literature and architecture, between one art on the side of fluidity and impermanence and the other that is all about solidity and tends towards a kind of eternity.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has moved into a phase marked by the law that defines Israel as the “nation state of the Jewish people”, adopting Hebrew as its only official language. Donatella Di Cesare, an Italian philosopher, and Éric Marty, a leading French voice in literary studies, have both written and taken a public stance on Israel, Judaism and the Jewish question. Here they comment on the law, taking different paths as to its meaning, reach and consequences.