In the year of the bicentenary of Karl Marx's birth, the historian José Neves addresses the complex legacy that the philosopher left us, a legacy that did not pass the test of time or the ups-and-downs of political and economic history. He talks of what is still current – and often such an integral part of current language and representations of the political and social world that we all seem to be more or less Marxians, even if we are not Marxists.

This text conjures up a voyage, a ‘theory-fiction’ that leads the reader to the Anthropocene, the new geological age. The fiction begins with a well-known character, recognizable by his yellow head of hair and his tweets, and ends with a fantasy where a reinvented Marx is the author of a critique of political astronomy.

In the journal of the singer-songwriter Lula Pena, the reinvention of words (‘I didn’t find what I wanted in the dictionary’) is a condition for the reinvention of time (‘Sometimes one day is quite a lot and the eve of nothing much’). Written in a style that inquires into its own process, the text is made of sounds and images (‘graphic and phonographic remains’). Lula Pena writes, ‘Sounds are launched on the adventure of the written word and its verbal explorations, scouting for listeners’. This is the purpose of our ‘Book of Hours’, where time is the board for a game in which the only winners are those willing to bet everything.

In our time, memory, in its social and collective dimensions, has become a theme of public discussion, closely linked to violent, or even traumatic, historical events, from the Holocaust to 9/11. Today the possibility of turning memory into a literary device, like Proust, is reduced or even impossible: at this time individual memory, as a psychic mechanism, is confronted with its technological prostheses, e.g. smartphones, computers and the Internet, where all the memory in the world, which used to be represented in libraries and archives, is stored. Since memory and the manifestations of its hegemony (visible in the obsession with heritage, in the ceaseless inauguration of museums, and in the public agenda of celebrations and reflections) mark our time with a whiff of decadence, we devote to it ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra.

An obsession with memory, a memory wave, a memory culture: these describe a current phenomenon that consists of the hypertrophy of memory, with manifestations that are cultural, social and political. The concept linked to individual psychology – personal memory, which we have known is uncertain and vulnerable to unconscious detours, at least since Freud – has been transferred to the collective plane and expanded as a viscous and extremely appealing matter. To such an extent that ‘memory’ has become a master-signifier of our time – a time that is subjected to the regime of the present, to what the historian François Hartog calls ‘presentism’. (On the question of memory, as it has been made the main topic of this issue of Electra, the theoretical contributions of this French historian to the ‘regimes of historicity’ are very important: for that reason, we conducted an interview with him, which we include here). But, even though our time is dominated by the historical category of the present, it is simultaneously obsessed with the past.

Michael Hardt, one of the most distinguished political theorists of our time, talks to Electra about love and revolution, language and liberation, and his new project about the renewed urgency of looking at the global revolutionary movements of the 1970s.

Michael Morris is an architect of Irish and US nationality. He lives in New York City, where he works on projects that connect architecture, art and science. He shared the Morris Sato Studio with his wife and partner Yoshiko Sato, who died in 2012. After Sato’s death, he took over the lead of her space architecture design studio and research group at Columbia University. In 2006, Sato and Morris initiated space projects with their former students and, in 2015, collectively formed the collaborative group SEArch+ (Space Exploration Architecture) to work with NASA on cutting-edge projects that examine the possibility of human living in other parts of space.

Psychoanalyst and philosopher Miguel Benasayag, a writer whose output is as varied as his academic training, speaks in this interview about certain features of our time when the human brain is increasingly delegating its functions to artificial intelligence and when the ‘cultural discontent’, analysed by Freud, has been brought up to date in the form of an empty narcissism.

A reflection by Milan Kundera on the tragic history of Central Europe – this ‘Kidnapped West’ – is commented here by Christian Salmon, who was the Czech writer's assistant. Salmon is the author of Storytelling. La machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits [Storytelling. The storytelling and mind-formatting machine] and L'ère du Clash [The Clash Era] – to name but two of his books with wide international acclaim – and in 1993 founded the International Parliament of Writers.

Jorge Molder’s work can be understood as a “series of series” that views us as a mysterious question. His photographs present a play on meaning that questions conventions, destabilising concepts (of reality and illusion, for instance) and shaking up our internal geography. Apropos of the recent publication of two books on Molder, Claudio Rozzoni looks at his work (the “Molder machine” and its effects) and its lasting artistic and philosophical impact.