Not so long ago we rarely encountered the verb ‘scrutinise’. And not even a glimpse of it in literary texts. We cannot pronounce or write such a word without crashing against its materiality, without feeling the friction and sound of its consonants.

Jason Read, a Spinozian and professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine (USA), writes a blog (Unemployed Negativity) in which he analyses how work is depicted in films and books. In this article, the subject of analysis is the famous TV series Breaking Bad, in which the plot, focused on the character of the chemistry teacher-turned-drug lord Walter White, emphasises the role of work as a central issue.

A city is also made of the intentions, desires, gestures and acts that fill it with other movement and cover it with different rhythms. To observe it in its streets and obstacles, to unveil it where it opens and closes up, to act performatively on the city is, at the same time, to confirm and transform it, to traverse and probe it, to surpass and transcend it, to preserve and disturb it. It is to impart an instability to its stability, an ephemerality to its continuity, a departure to its permanence, a metamorphosis to its form. Performance art is a praxis: we transform ourselves by transforming, we become what we are and what we are not. This is what preoccupies Ana Pais, a theatre critic, professor and researcher, and the editor of Performance in the Public Sphere.

Taking on the labyrinth, the literary critic and art history researcher, João Oliveira Duarte, writes on the vast volume that brings together all the critical work of Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, to which the poet gave a simple descriptive title Poesia Portuguesa Contemporânea [Contemporary Portuguese Poetry].

The increasingly volatile nature of the value of money and of money itself, which requires stability above all else, means we are just waiting for the next financial collapse. The philosopher Yves Citton uses this statement to expand on seven ‘lessons’ that need to be taken from this situation, which gives rise to a kind of ‘collapsology’. These seven ‘stories’ or ‘lessons’ are untimely considerations for economic theories.

In this essay-feature, the musician, programmer and publisher Pedro Gomes talks to four artists associated with Creole Rap, who tell us stories from the neighbourhoods of the Greater Lisbon area and the South Bank. It also shows us the photos that the photographer Diogo Simões took for Electra. The encounter of words and pictures is accompanied by the rhythms of a music that has recently taken hold.

‘If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,’ Bernard Baruch once said. ‘If all you have is a phone with an internet connection, everything looks like a web,’ we could say in an echo, in a chorus (or through loudspeakers). From the small light of a multicoloured screen, the world is becoming increasingly similar, not like a supermarket shelf from which we select objects for purchasing, but like a rhizome of data and relationships that we can access, almost instantly, with a click.

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.