The neo-liberal market presents itself as a cosmos, an order, in the sense that it governs individual conduct and therefore requires an anthropological approach. Thus, it actualises the concept that humans will never be the masters of their own destiny and presupposes that everything is quantifiable and therefore subject to governance by algorithm. This is the theory set out and developed by philosopher Dario Gentili, a professor at Roma Tre University and author of among others, the book Crisi come arte di governo [Crisis as an Art of Government]; a genealogy of the concept of crisis.

The author of Knowledge and the Philosophy of Number (2020), Keith Hossak, a Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, explains something seemingly basic, but that is enormously complex for a layperson to comprehend: what is a number, what is counting, and how is the infinite quantity of numbers analogous to the mind of God, the supreme mathematician.

Political communication researcher Susana Salgado comments on a quote from Noel Gallagher, former Oasis vocalist. She warns that, ‘emotions trump facts’ in these times of ‘over-democratisation of the individual’.

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.

The publication of António Franco Alexandre’s collected poems reveals the diversity of his poetry from one book to another, and also shows the author’s stringent formal and thematic poetic standards without being conventionally formalistic or content driven. It is this quality that has earned them pride of place in the field of contemporary Portuguese poetry.

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.

Giving time a number that we use to count and commemorate it, is seeking a continuity that connects the future to the past in this strange, usual place that we call the present. It also means approaching what anthropologists call a symbolic domain or perhaps even a magical order. As we draw closer, we touch that distance in which surrealists saw life and freedom coincide in the myth that eternalises the moment.

Identity is the great political issue of our time, to the point that demands for identity have acquired an important role in the political space where battles are waged. Gender, sexuality, ‘race’, ethnicity, culture and nationality are territories that appeal to a feeling of belonging, whilst at the same time determining a fight for recognition and a consciousness induced by self-recognition. We could say that the political sensitivity centred on the idea of social construction has faded due to a change in the moral sensitivity of individuals. This sharp turn has brought new subjects to the fore and, in symbolic terms, guaranteed equality for women, gays, blacks and other groups similarly marked by a history of humiliation, subordination and exploitation. Around identity issues and the politics that try to address them, flags and barricades are raised, and friends and enemies are formed.

In this written interview, Éric Marty addresses some of the compulsory stopping points in his book, Le sexe des Modernes: the consequences of the sex/gender binomial, the ‘trans’ as the figure that disrupts gender theory and the critical dialogue with Judith Butler.

Starting with a dubious ‘discovery’ by a French classical literature scholar that the real authors of Louise Labé’s works are actually men, the writer and artist Olivia Rosenthal writes about the effacement of women from the history of art and of literature.