In this article, the author of Etica dei resti [The Ethics of Remnants], Gianluca Cuozzo, professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin, develops a philosophy of waste and an analysis of rubbish and refuse as the dark and recalcitrant side of our consumer civilisation.

Grotesque power, one of the long-standing declensions of political power, has triumphantly re-emerged in our time in the form of figures who act like buffoons, clowns and jesters. This is what writer and journalist Christian Salmon, contributor to some of the most prestigious international newspapers and author of a vast and original body of work on our contemporaneity, discusses in this essay.

The luxury of writing, writing of luxury, luxury as excess in relation to an economy of utility: it is along these lines that this article by Australian McKenzie Wark, professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the New School in New York, and author of A Hacker Manifesto and Love and Money, Sex and Death, unfolds.

Paul Morland, a renowned expert in demographic science and a former associate research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and senior member of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, reviews the incorrect predictions of Thomas Malthus. He explains here how the law of excess and scarcity works in the history of demography and why almost the entire world has entered a downward trajectory.

In the history of the ‘+’ sign (addition), which was introduced, just like the ‘−’ sign (subtraction), in arithmetic writing to simplify accounting, Belgian philosopher Laurent de Sutter finds the cipher of excess, in a philosophical sense as well as an arithmetical one.

A verse from a poem by Fernando Pessoa, if regarded autonomously, would appear to be a proposition that could have been taken from a philosophical work or a reflection that takes on the form of an aphorism that produces false evidence. Here, poet and professor of Literature Amândio Reis comments on the verse quoted above.

Visual artist Mónica de Miranda, historian Sónia Vaz Borges and choreographer Vânia Gala form the collective representing Portugal at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale, whose general theme is ‘Foreigners Everywhere’. The three authors have contributed to this edition of Electra with texts and images that reveal the major themes and motivations of the ‘Greenhouse’ project showcased in the Portuguese pavilion located at Palazzo Franchetti. This project features a Creole garden which serves as a starting point for exploring the themes of colonialism, war, liberation struggles, and ecology.

The Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cesare, author, among other works, of The Time of Revolt, travelled to Portugal in 1975 to witness the ongoing revolution that had had a major impact in Italy. Almost half a century later, she now gives her account of that ‘revolutionary holiday’.

People need to know that any liberation struggle is a combination of victories and suffering, and sometimes those two things are in the same person or the same family or the same group.

The sun blinds me. I can't see anything. I am a living being with only one life, and so until I die, I want to be born.