Divided (or multiplied) between Lisbon and Trás‑os-Montes, between the city and the countryside, over the years, the painter Graça Morais has kept an intermittent diary, where she records, in images and words, her impressions and reflections on what she sees and experiences. In this diary, she draws the fruits of the earth, animal figures, human faces and victims of war, accompanying those visual notes with direct and quick verbal commentary. In this ‘Book of Hours’, which corresponds to different times, a few unpublished pages of the artist’s diary are revealed. Running alongside a vast and renowned work, they develop a discontinuous, yet endlessly illuminating dialogue.

The current war in Ukraine, caused by the Russian invasion, is what prompts Viriato Soromenho-Marques to go back to another armed conflict, the First World War, in order to analyse the nationalist and euphoric wartime discourses cultivated in German cultural and intellectual circles.

The Italian philosopher wrote a book about Hölderlin, focusing on the second part of his life, the phase of madness, from 1807 to 1843, the year of the poet's death. For these thirty-seven years the poet lived in a house on the River Neckar, in Tübingen, under the care of the carpenter Ernst Zimmer and his wife. What does it mean to inhabit, what does ‘habitual’ or ‘inhabiting’ life mean? This is the central question of Agamben's book, read here by Bernardo Vaz de Castro.

Within the contemporary rogues gallery, the oligarch is a composite character. James Bond’s soviet adversary abandons the bureaucratic fervour and discovers the libidinal excess of commodities. Rasputin leaves behind the palatial intrigue to become a wise guy who bribes the president of the parish council. The Bolshevik who seized the tsar’s throne dies and is replaced by a small-time nightlife entrepreneur.

It is worth looking at the past as closely as we look to the future. In his 1991 book The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Samuel P. Huntington (the American political scientist whose theories on changes in the world order and the clash of civilisations caused heated controversies) said that the Portuguese Revolution of 25 April, 1974 began the third wave of democratisation that hit the Soviet Union and the whole of Eastern Europe, and led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and which continued in Latin America and Africa.

For the last two decades, at least, we have got used to listening to a chorus of pessimistic voices, to which we attribute an ever increasing value of truth, which tell us about the ‘crisis of democracy’, ‘the unease in/of democracy’, the ailing ‘state of democracy’ and even the need to categorise it as ‘post’ to suggest that it has become necessary to update it conceptually.

In this article, Chantal Mouffe, professor of political theory at the University of Westminster, England, continues to formulate some of the ideas developed in her books: an agonistic conception of politics, i.e. one that does not seek consensus and integrates affects and passions; and a recovery from some aspects of populism towards a radicalisation of democracy.

A key figure in contemporary political philosophy, Wendy Brown has published a number of reference studies on neoliberalism, reconstituting not only the long historical trajectory that has culminated in the present moment, but also warning us that it is on a collision course with the very idea of democracy. In conversation with Electra, Wendy Brown explores and unpacks several of the faultlines underpinning the political present.

Taking as his starting point the common observation that representational democracies have collapsed, Yves Citton, professor of Literature and Media at Paris 8 University, co-director of the magazine Multitudes and author, among many other books and articles, of Médiaarchie and Pour une écologie de l 'attention, reflects on a system of power which is structured by the logic of media and from which, for instance, conspiracism is born.

Tracing the history of democracy and its interruptions from the beginning of the 20th to the beginning of the 21st century, the sociologist and historian Manuel Villaverde Cabral, researcher emeritus of the University of Lisbon, shows how Max Weber’s theoretical pessimism is still relevant in this political time which has seen a fragmentation of parties – the organisations on which ‘bourgeois democracy’ are founded – and the emergence of new populisms.