Taking as his starting point a classic quote from Charles Péguy, author Christian Salmon, who was Milan Kundera’s assistant, reflects with great originality on the relationship between our current times and Greek antiquity, bearing in mind the ‘nostalgia for the ancients and the post-modern appetite for heroes and stories’.

One of the characteristics of our time, which can be observed in many domains and from different perspectives, is the tendency (or trend) – and this word is already part of the complex – to cultivate and give the greatest privileges to everything that presents itself as new, that conforms to the general regime of newness as a social and cultural imperative. In this regime, the new is not that which interrupts the course of the world and time (as were the phenomena that followed the revolution model; the artistic avantgardes, for example), but that which perfectly adapts itself to the spirit of the epoch, the futility of the time, the prevailing ‘neopathy’. Therefore, the attitude that promotes the new as a great imperative which forms on the surface of actuality is not incompatible with a conservative position. The new as a commandment fully satisfies the desires of homogenisation that inevitably inhabit culture, at a time when even heritagisation and museumification are trying to invent factors of novelty.

For the ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra we chose a topic that is, by definition, always current: ‘the new’. To develop it in several directions we have counted on the valuable contributions of authors from various fields of knowledge: Boris Groys (in an interview), critic, art and media scholar, and philosopher; François Hartog, historian; Iwan Rhys Morus, historian of science; Lionel Ruffel, critic and essayist on literary theory and studies; Nuno Nabais, philosopher.

No one better than the renowned historian François Hartog, the author of Chronos: The West Confronts Time, could write on how the notion of the new and the modern arose and evolved; or how the opposition between the Ancient and the Modern was established, resulting in a centuries‑long quarrel; or when the new came to be viewed in a positive light. This approach to historical investigation, which owes a great deal to philology, evident in this article, is a hallmark of Hartog's historiographical method.

In this interview, eminent philosopher Boris Groys speaks on the topic of the new – a theme which he examined with great astuteness in his book Über das Neue. The interviewer, Catarina Pombo Nabais, is the author of the book Philosophical Conversations – Towards Self-Design, which is a long conversation with Groys.

The concept of ‘new’, as it is understood in philosophy, science and art, has a long history beginning with the notion of deviation, which Lucretius identified as the origin of all forms of new. Nuno Nabais, professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, traces some of the stages in this history in order to arrive at the complex concept of new in contemporary philosophical and scientific thought.

Written a few days before the elections in France, this text by Lionel Ruffel – essayist, researcher and professor of Literature at the University of Paris VIII – responds with emotion to the political situation of the crisis and the expectation it has engendered, in the country that gave rise to the new par excellence in the form of the Revolution.

In this essay, science historian Iwan Rhys Morus shows how, in the 19th century, the concepts of ‘new’ and ‘progress’ changed and how another idea of the future was invented, which became inseparable from science and technology. Morus is a university professor of History in Wales and has published important studies on scientific advances in the Victorian era and their consequences for culture (for example, the creation of science fiction novels by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells).

In 1938, at the age of 31 years and with a remarkable future scientific career ahead of him, physicist Ettore Majorana, a disciple of Physics Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi – who considered Majorana a genius –, disappeared at a time when Italy was going through turbulent political confrontation. To this day, no one really knows what happened. Since then, the mystery of Majorana's disappearance has never ceased to intrigue, causing rivers of ink to flow and generating strange hypotheses and theories. Among others, the acclaimed author Leonardo Sciascia dedicated a book to him: La Scomparsa di Majorana [The Disappearance of Marjorana]. It is this enigmatic case that mathematician Umberto Bartocci, formerly a professor at the University of Perugia, revisits in his essay for Electra, not shying away from advancing his theories on this dramatic, radical disappearance.

In the field of political theory, there is today heated discussion about the metamorphosis and future of the party form, an institution which played a fundamental role in the construction of the modern body politic, but which, as a mass party, has now reached its end. To address this issue, we called on two ‘politologists’: sociologist Pedro Magalhães, a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, and Damiano Palano, professor of Political Philosophy and author of Bubble democracy. La fine del pubblico e la nuova polarizzazione [Bubble democracy. The end of the public and the new polarisation]. Two reflections that coincide considerably in their diagnosis, but which sometimes differ in the conclusions they draw.