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’.

In this text, occasionally drawing on examples from the ‘Spanish political laboratory’, Félix Duque undertakes a critical analysis of ‘identitarianism’, a term the Spanish philosopher uses to refer to the mystical and essentialist belief in identity responsible for two current political phenomena: populism and national populism.

Historian Francisco Bethencourt’s vast work on the history of racism (or rather racisms) is in many ways entangled with highly topical issues of identity, such as those linked to post-colonial theories and thought on decolonisation. This interview with the current holder of the Charles Boxer Chair at King’s College Department of History, in London, took the form of written questions and answers.

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 ‘colonial science’ article, historian Diogo Ramada Curto addresses the disciplines such as geography, anthropology and ethnology that colonisers used to learn more about ‘indigenous races’ and their habits and customs in order to manage their colonial programmes more effectively.

Almeida Faria’s literary oeuvre is made up of different genres and registers, sometimes in the same novel. This is the case of Paixão, the first book in his ‘Lusitanian Tetralogy’, which is almost a polyphonic novel in its complex development of different voices. This time, he has made an incursion into journalling at the invitation of the Electra. The journal that he wrote for this section of the magazine, called ‘Book of Hours’, begins on a triumphant day, 16th June, the Bloomsday that Joyce included in the calendar of modern European literature. Thus, this journal starts as a tribute to literary fiction, to its magnificent deeds (a tribute which continues in an evocation of an important name in European literature, a European writer par excellence, the German Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 118with whom Almeida Faria has a long-standing dialogue). Recording a few days’ stay in Munich, starting with the day of his departure from Lisbon and ending on his return, this journal is also a record of his distancing himself from national matters. In a way, this distancing, which consists of getting away (and by away we mean to a foreign country) and casting a critical, cosmopolitan, look inwards, isa mechanism common to the narrative work of Almeida Faria.

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.

Delhi, India’s fabled capital, has been built, destroyed and rebuilt many times over the centuries. It is a metropolis made up of many cities, but the most captivating is Old Delhi or the Walled City. It is described in this geographical guide, which is also a dictionary of love, with words and images crafted by Mayank Austen Soofi for this View of Delft. Soofi is a well- known Indian writer and photographer. He writes a daily column for the historical Hindustan Times, with a readership of over one million. He also boasts a highly influential presence on social media (website The Delhi Walla, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter). He says, ‘Repeatedly bruised and battered by its violent past, the historic quarter is struggling to adapt itself to the chaos, conflicts, and conveniences of the modern world’.

The images in this portfolio, conceived by Jorge Queiroz for Electra, speak of the revelation and concealment that give them a sense of continuous discovery. A skilled draughtsman and an utterly original painter, the author of O Banho de Arquimedes [Archimedes bath] has had an uncompromising international career, which, unlike others, does not submit to facile and external dictates. With a gaze that encompasses the successive epochs of art history, Jorge Queiroz allows his oeuvre to build a personal contemporaneity that dialogues with the art movements which have shaped our modernity since the late 19th century. His art resorts to certain aspects of science to enact a prestidigitation in which formal imagination and material imagination shadow each other. This portfolio is presented by curator Antonia Gaeta, for whom ‘The oeuvre of Jorge Queiroz is steeped in the conviction that what is loved endures, and that the quest for light is in equal parts narration and portent’.

One of the most prominent philosophers of the twenty-first century and arguably the one most engaged with the issue of change in the world today, Catherine Malabou has covered the most disparate topics in contemporary critical thought, from neuroscience to feminism, from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency, from epigenetic trauma to sexual pleasure. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, Catherine Malabou recalls the journey that culminated in her new book on the political idea of anarchism, the latest variation on the concept that brings together her entire work: plasticity.