This question was raised after the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded, rather controversially, to Peter Handke, who publicly defended the former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. In this section, two authors give us their response: the critic, essayist and translator João Barrento, and the writer and director of the French journal Lignes, Michel Surya. João Barrento reviews a series of problematic ‘cases’ in the art and literature of the twentieth century to demonstrate the complexity of the issue and the different answers that he has obtained; Michel Surya asserts quite radically that great literature, ever the subject of scandal, knows no limits.

The French philosopher and author of Biopolitique des catastrophes, Frédéric Neyrat, carries out a critical analysis of the present, identifying its ‘kinetic dilemma’, a hesitation between two movements, one too fast and the other too slow, that are responsible for the ecological disaster. Discontinuation, he argues, is the sole ‘kinetic therapy’ that can respond to the immense problems confronting us today.

Simon Critchley, one of the most prolific and popular philosophers of the last decades, talks to Electra about some of the varied topics that have been guiding his work, from the role of philosophy in contemporary society to the disillusionment with liberal democracy, the cultural importance of football, and the challenges of autobiographical writing.

An architect and author of influential essays on cities and food – and the supply of food to cities – Carolyn Steel has developed a significant theory around the concept of ‘Sitopia’, i.e. the world as a place shaped by food. At the heart of her analysis is the contemporary presumption of cheap food produced by an agrifood industry that is putting the future of life on Earth at risk.

A charismatic and experienced cinema sound designer was once asked what makes the acoustic environment of Lisbon unique. Disconcertingly, his reply was, ‘Nothing!’ Lisbon’s soundscape is indistinguishable from that of any other city because all cities sound more and more alike under the pervasive, continuous, monotonous hum of traffic. Vasco Pimentel – the experienced sound designer in question – eventually admitted there were areas within the city that had characteristic sounds, and that his hyperbolical, iconoclastic quip had been merely rhetorical. Still, it is surprising (and ironic) to find that some of the more distinctive sounds of Lisbon come, even now, from the Ponte 25 de Abril suspension bridge built in 1966.

At what point did we begin referring to education predominantly as an investment, love as a contract, family as a partnership, friendship as a network, and the future as a dividend? When did the naturalisation of this language occur, establishing a relationship to the world on the basis of a transaction according to which experience is defined by returns, and subjectivity by value? An indicator of this profound mutation can be found in the way the word speculation inscribed itself so vehemently and yet so banally in the contemporary imaginary. While current usage has reduced it to something commonplace due to its association with financial markets, deals and scams; the word still carries its centuries of muted meanings, when a speculator meant a mystical prophet, star gazer, mirror maker, or visionary artist. These are the forgotten declinations of the prime category of the era of financial capital, that which defines our political unconscious.

Among the many names that have been used to describe the society in which we live, a matter that also involves issues within the realms of theory (the society of the spectacle, society of simulacra, risk society, etc.), there might be yet another very important name: the society of speed and acceleration. The technical acceleration of modernity, which in recent times has reached a state of paroxysm at the limit of the speed of light thanks to information and digital technologies, has become the most decisive phenomenon not only in social and cultural change but also in the way we live our lives. The experience of time, as marked by acceleration, has become a vertiginous spiral. Everything, from the circulation of money to information, from work rules to leisure activities, takes place at a speed that is increasing relentlessly. This has led to two emblematic diseases of our time. One, burnout, is physical and psychological and the other is socio-political in nature and bears an old name in new clothes, alienation. Appeals have been made to slow down, for the sake of our health and that of our planet. But it was not these appeals that caused a spectacular break in this movement that everyone believed to be irreversible unless there were some kind of natural catastrophe. The slowdown has come in the guise of a virus that has spread all over the world. It was enough for us to experience in practice what we already knew in theory: in the world that we live in, reducing speed brings everything falling down round our ears. Because speed is a total social phenomenon, we have chosen it as the ‘Subject’ for this edition of Electra.

On the basis of two films, the teacher, who is also (or especially) a poet and renowned translator, reflects on his experience of dealing with school-age youngsters. He takes the stage in a clear-sighted relationship with the ‘restless’ characters of students going through the different stages of a sinuous ‘mental path’.
 

Stefan Kürten is a well-reputed German artist whose work has been shown in art galleries and institutions in Europe and the USA. He was professor for painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is currently guest professor at the School of Art and Design, Alfred University, New York. In this portfolio, especially created for Electra, he develops some of the themes and motifs most represented in his work. The respected curator and critic Gregor Jansen, director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, wrote the following essay expressly to accompany this artwork. He speaks of the inspiration that Kürten’s work finds in cinema, of the strange relationship between architecture, innocence and terror – and, also, of the images, and the stories that we derive from them.

Ann Cotten is an Austrian poet and essayist, born in the United States, whose work, recognised for its originality and plurality, has been published by the prestigious German publisher Suhrkamp. Here, the writer introduces us to Steyr, a ‘statutory city’ in Upper Austria, named after one of its two rivers. In understanding the journey to get there, we begin to form a notion of what we are going to find, in a powerful association of nature with historical and cultural memory and with its industrial factory heritage. In this text, in which the impersonal precision of objective information is combined with a personal and subjective look, we are given a portrait of a land that Ann Cotten visited to meet friends who ‘are master skiers and keep a mountain hut for hiking in summer and a chalet for winter sports’.