There is a gruesome scene in Mark Mylod’s famous film The Menu (2022) which takes place in a fine-dining restaurant with few tables and only twelve guests on an obscure and secluded island. At one point, Julian Slowik, the restaurant’s celebrated chef, who prepares a new special menu for his diners each time, full of all sorts of surprises (and not only gastronomic ones), introduces his guests to Jeremy, ‘the good but not great’ sous chef who, after the chef-genius’s spiel concludes, sticks a gun in his mouth and commits suicide.

To mark the centenary of Franz Kafka's death (b. 03.07.1883 – d. 03.06.1924), Electra is publishing three articles on the Czech writer: one by Gianluca Cuozzo, professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin, on representations of bureaucracy and the exercise of power, or, to put it another way, everything that gave rise to the adjective ‘kafkaesque’, which has now come into common usage; another article by António Guerreiro centred on biographical issues, drawing on the monumental three-volume biography of Kafka by the German author Reiner Stach; and finally, an article by Jacques Le Rider, a French Germanist and renowned scholar of Central European literature and culture, who writes about Kafka's bilingualism, his relationship with the German and Czech languages, and the historical and linguistic background of Prague.

Franz Kafka understood the forms and rules of the exercise of power in the contemporary world with particular lucidity; forms and rules in which violence is concealed, made acceptable because it is entrusted not to the executioner or to a repressive apparatus that makes a direct and threatening show of itself, but to the weapons of writing. 

Who was Kafka? Who was that man who had a vast, monstruous world inside his head and whose life was an ascesis in literature and for literature? The mystery called ‘Kafka’ is covered by the thick layer of a banal daily life as an employee of an insurance company, but he was in fact ‘made of literature’, incapable of being anything else. Since then, a succession of interpreters has tried to decipher the enigma, assuming it carries the form of an inner abyss. Before anyone else, Walter Benjamin said that the Czech writer did everything in his power to make the answer to the question of his identity inaccessible: ‘It is as if [Kafka] had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.’

During Franz Kafka’s lifetime (1883–1924), the situation changed with respect to the German language in Prague. In 1880, Prague and its suburbs still had almost 42,000 German-speaking inhabitants, some 15% of the total population. By 1900, the number had fallen to 33,776, or 7.5% of Prague’s population, including the suburbs. Of these 34,000 or so German speakers in Prague, an estimated 40% were Jews.

This ‘View of Delft’ seems like a film set in Seville during the famous Holy Week. As the author, Marta G. Franco, a specialist in contemporary communication, tells us: there are 'seventy-two processions, from Friday of Sorrows until Easter Sunday, because Semana Santa in Seville is excessive even in the number of days it lasts.' As we read, through the text we are able to see the processions and everything that happens around them. These rituals, which fulfil age-old traditions, at the same time make use of the latest resources such as new technologies. As Marta G. Franco reminds us they are all participating in a work of street theatre, each with a role.

The work of Italian sociologist Vania Baldi, author of Otimizados e Desencontrados. Ética e Crítica na Era da Inconsciência Artificial [Optimised and Disconnected. Ethics and Criticism in the Era of Artificial Unconsciousness] draws on the philosophy and anthropology of technology. In this article, he challenges the unrestricted belief, blind optimism, and ethical negligence regarding the new systems of Artificial Intelligence.

José Marmeleira, art critic and professor at the School of Arts and Design (Caldas da Rainha), writes about a recent book by Hal Foster, who is one of the most important critics and historians of North American art, a member of October magazine, and already interviewed in Electra (issue 22, Autumn 2023). This book questions the art-criticism binomial.

In the past, this was the quintessential scholar, the philologist, the exegete. They all deciphered and interpreted ancient, obscure, or highly specialised texts. The Bible is certainly the text that has garnered the most commentators and commentaries to this day. There are also countless ancient books self-described as commentarii, a denomination that immediately placed them within a genre, with rules as specific as a grammar. This tradition has reached our times completely ‘secularised’, in the form of text commentary, an exercise that turns reading and the interpretation of literary texts into a classic, although endangered, goal of the school and university systems.

To speak, anew, of the new is to ask time to give us the words with which it becomes another − or with which it shows itself to us as different in its flow, handing us the signs that could say, like Arthur Rimbaud: ‘Je est un autre.’ It is in that movement of change, rupture, revolution, heresy, revelation, that verbs, with their tenses, indicating time, pass from the past to the future and that nouns, with their power, name that which is being born, emerging, breaking through, showing itself and being said.