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.

Sepideh Karami is an Iranian architect, writer, teacher and researcher whose work brings architecture into domains as diverse as performing arts, literature and geology. Professor of Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, she tells us here about the city where she chose to live and work, with a unique gaze, both near (where it finds itself) and far (from where it came). On her verbal journey through Scotland's capital, Sepideh tells us what she sees, what she deciphers, what she interprets and what she guesses. From buildings to gardens, from the general to the particular, from gestures to objects, from the ground to the sky, the author describes a city made up of many spaces and many times, many speeds and many layers of meaning. At the beginning, it is stated: ‘Edinburgh is the city of getting wet and dry in quick succession.’ And it is as if this climatic antithesis runs through the entire text to teach us how to feel Edinburgh and what happens there.

At the end of his life, Barthes wrote a sentence that shows some scepticism towards modern literature, whose most radical experiments he had always adhered to or at least taken an interest in. Éric Marty, editor of the complete works of Roland Barthes, comments on this sentence and explains the context within which it was born.

The Italian philosopher Remo Bodei is currently a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of a vast oeuvre, which includes a book entitled Generazioni (2014). In it, he points out that our history has been marked by a generational fracture. He insists that, as a result, we must accept responsibility with regard to the younger generation, on various levels, at a time fraught with uncertainties about the future.

Autumn is said to make us think about those late, muted colours that some artists used in their works as if they belonged to them: Arcimboldo, Brueghel, Poussin, Boucher, Goya, Friedrich, Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Klimt, Schiele, Mucha, Klee, Hockney. Contemplating, digressing, recalling, dreaming, meditating, brooding and thinking are verbs that are part of this wisdom that does not know the flip side of the coin of life, the side that flips entirely towards us.

In the eyes of a poet born and living in Barcelona, this city has always attracted visitors and travellers, but has never easily lent itself to a complete knowledge and understanding. Today, swamped by tourists who think they see everything, it remains a mystery.

Céline’s anti-Semitic pamphlets — written between 1937-1941 and forbidden since the end of World War Two — aroused once again a violent polemic at the end of last year, when Gallimard announced it was going to republish them in a critical edition and, soon after, following some of the public reactions, gave up 100 diagonals on the project. On this controversial issue, we publish here the differing views of two authoritative voices on the matter: Pierre-André Taguieff, author of a remarkable essay on Céline’s anti-Semitism, and Serge Klarsfeld, one of the great activists in France for the rights of deported Jews.

When can an opinion be a crime? What are the limits to the freedom of expression? At what point does my freedom end because someone else’s begins? These questions have been raised in our times with an urgency that stems from the need to square the freedom of thought and of expression in public (nowadays on the social media as well) with the prevention of threats of whose danger and seriousness history makes us aware. On these clearly topical questions, the Spanish writer and journalist Francisco Alba and the Portuguese lawyer and criminologist Rui Patrício pen their ideas.

In the times we are living in, new digital technologies provide us with a true flood of information. But we remain highly ignorant of how this information is produced, selected, and ranked, i.e. there is an information deficit on information itself, which leads to its acritical acceptance and a backward step in thinking and reflection.

Drawing on the theoretical, literary and musical contributions of the Cape Verdean musician Mário Lúcio, who takes creoleness as a cultural and political ideal, Marta Lança, programmer and editor of the website Buala, evokes a few key theorists of creolisation and miscegenation, showing what is at stake in this phenomenon that transcends the Cape Verdean context.