The question of animal rights rests on a notion of politics that pushes it beyond its traditional limits. To think of and defend ‘animal politics’, which in its broadest sense amounts to ecopolitics, is the task to which the Bulgarian philosopher Boyan Manchev commits himself in this article, continuing his earlier work on ‘wild freedom’.

The portfolio we present here was prepared for Electra by one of the most renowned and most innovative artists of our time. He is also one of the most sophisticatedly learned and most effectively communicative.

In this work, William Kentridge couples semiology with iconology and finds the sacred meaning and profane use of words. By placing these two modes face to face, he creates through their coming together an indetermina-cy and interrogation. These works are like visi-ble sparks emitted by the incessant breath of an invisible fire. They are thus both familiar and strange to us at the same time.

On 7 December 1970, fifty years ago this year, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Willy Brandt, visited the Warsaw Ghetto during an official visit to Poland. There, he lay a wreath of flowers in memory of the Jews murdered during the Second World War and, unpredictably, kneeled before the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. Tragically stark, this picture, which associates political action with historical memory, became an iconic and ground-breaking image in photographic history, with a universal moral and political resonance. In 1971, Willy Brandt received the Nobel Peace Prize. In this Register section, the art historian Nicola Hille interprets the impact of this extraordinary precedent with great originality, questioning the relevance and validity in the present day of an act which at the time divided German public opinion.

A hundred years ago, while the First World War wrought its bodily and spiritual destruction, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, a soldier and prisoner in the war, wrote an enigmatic, fascinating and difficult book which, since its publication some years later, has become one of the great works of philosophy, bringing endless research and controversy in its wake. The Tratactus Logico-Philosophicus changed philosophy by radically challenging its tenets. The author, Leonel Azevedo, is a philosopher whose work has been primarily devoted to Wittgenstein.

The woke movement, or, to use a more appropriate name, the woke injunction, is a war cry that has summoned new forms of struggle and antagonisms to the public space where exacerbated stances are taken. Although in a serene manner, the two opposing texts in this section participate in this division: that of the Belgian writer and philosopher Véronique Bergen, who sees in 'wokism' a legitimate desire for emancipation that, however, 'falls into the opposite', and that by Carolina Flores, Portuguese philosopher and researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who conducts the anti-woke critique.

Wolfgang Tillmans, one of the most important artists in the global panorama of contemporary art, and nominated by TIME magazine this year as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world, has presented Electra with a series of previously unpublished photographs taken in the last years. The accompanying essay, authored by Afonso Dias Ramos, explores and situates these pictures within the context of a highly-acclaimed work of over four decades.

The essayist and art critic Federico Ferrari, professor at the Brera Academy (Milan) and one of the founders of the online magazine Antinomie, examines art’s gradual movement towards public visibility. This movement, which has culminated in the modern museums we know today, is driven by curiosity and may face a crisis if it declines and our capacity for awe weakens.

Work is one of the greatest issues of our time, an all-encompassing social fact and a world of paradoxes – there is both too much of it and not enough, at a time when artificial intelligence is replacing people and their jobs, while employees’ lives are increasingly diminished due to longer working hours and a loss of autonomy. The announcement of the end of work as we know it and the predictions of what has been termed a new ‘post-work’ society have not yet led to a suitable response at the political level nor in the customs and habits of the entire social system. However, the idea that it is necessary to reinvent work and how it is distributed to eliminate the increasingly relentless contrast between an elite and a huge mass of the unemployed, precariously employed, intermittently employed and temporarily employed is gaining ground. The current pandemic and its related circumstances have reinforced the idea of smart working and working from home, which, although operating within the framework and according to the rules of a system that has been dysfunctional for a long time, may be the beginning of a radical transformation. The issue of work, a diverse topic that covers many areas, is the ‘subject’ of this issue of Electra.

Examining some of the defining stages in the thought and representation of work by certain philosophers, from Antiquity to the present day, the essayist André Barata, a professor of philosophy, analyses Béla Tarr’s film The Turin Horse to show how work engenders the humanising factors of habit and repetition.

Immaterial labour – activities of a cognitive nature enhanced by the new digital technologies that have given rise to so-called ‘platform capitalism’ – has implied a huge transformation in the world of work and the expansion of precariousness, to the point that the traditional idea of employment is beginning to be seen as a thing of the past. These are the issues discussed in this article by José Nuno Matos, an expert in the sociology of work and a researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais in Lisbon.