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.

In this ‘View of Delft’, novelist and essayist Daniel Saldaña París writes about New York, the city where he currently lives, dividing himself between this city and his native Mexico City. In this account, there is at the same time both closeness and distance, coming from a gaze that travels from the outside, becoming interior and even intimate in the discovery he makes of this fascinating North American city, comparing it with other cities and evoking everything about it that he has read, seen and lived.

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.

The word nomad comes from the Latin nomas, -ădis, which in turn comes from the Greek νομάς, -άδος. For some reason that only intuition can understand, nomad seems to be close to the root of nostalgia (νόστος, ‘returning home’, –algia); however, the ‘no’ in nomad is not a probable node in the nostalgic stem. Nevertheless, the omen of returning home is always looming in a nomad’s future, as if it were the shadow of the word’s meaning. For that reason, nomads tend towards an odd form of nostalgia.