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year as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world, has presented Electra with a series of previously unpublished photographs taken in the last years.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.

Often announced throughout the 20th century as the spectre of ‘technological unemployment’ grew, the end of work has become a common trope with the emergence of new digital technologies and the development of intelligent machines that replace humans in production. This article covers the numerous signs of the end of work (or employment, at least), mainly focusing on the contemporary debate about the ‘crisis of work’, which either acquires a utopian character or draws an apocalyptic scenario.

The dossier included in this edition of Electra looks at two concepts, idleness and leisure, the understanding of which has shifted and turned over their long history. We explore how leisure and idleness are seen today, in the awareness that the current meaning of these formerly opposing ideas cannot be properly understood without looking back to a time we have left behind and can only contemplate from afar. Once radically different from each other, these two concepts tend to overlap in modern society, with only a few slight differences: whilst leisure is understood as a break from our working schedule, idleness points to an existential condition or a psychological characteristic with negative connotations. The former dichotomy has dissolved and been transferred to another pair of ideas, much more relevant to us today: the relationship between work and leisure, the alternation between which underpins life in the society of work.

A few lines before the above quote, which is the focus for this discussion, Woolf wrote a curious sentence: ‘My profession is literature.’ I would certainly never write those words.