One of the most prominent philosophers of the twenty-first century and arguably the one most engaged with the issue of change in the world today, Catherine Malabou has covered the most disparate topics in contemporary critical thought, from neuroscience to feminism, from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency, from epigenetic trauma to sexual pleasure. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, Catherine Malabou recalls the journey that culminated in her new book on the political idea of anarchism, the latest variation on the concept that brings together her entire work: plasticity.

(Definition 1: slow march)

How do you bring overused words back into the world? Among countless hypotheses, let us think of the punch of two other words: seduction and courage. The beguiling challenge – and to accept it, you must be naive and susceptible to seduction. Or the brave, clear-headed creature that chooses the obstacle, the enemy.

From a very early age till late in life, Churchill wrote in order to speak of the world, the United Kingdom, and himself. On one occasion, he declared that history would be generous to him, because he was going to write it. When the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the great victor in the Second World War, it brought attention to a literary oeuvre that is indispensable to an understanding of the man and the audacity of his deeds. Drawing on the “old lion’s” own books and those that many authors have written about him, the diplomat and historian Bernardo Futscher Pereira provides us with another portrait of Winston Churchill.

At a time when it has become evident that the scale of large cities makes them fragile in all areas, especially when facing an invisible virus,Thierry Paquot, author of Mesure et démesure des villes [Moderation and Excess in Cities], as well as other books on issues of contemporary urbanism, opposes the concept of the bioregion to the increasingly numerous megalopolises and the various forms of urban disaster with which we are confronted today.

Examining the city today with its metamorphoses and aggravated manifestations, such as its most eloquent sign, the megalopolis – which some see as decline and others as a mark of huge vitality – is an exercise that places us on terrain exposed to every aspect of political, social and cultural life. The city is a theme of huge and impressive scope. In the age we live in, there is a particular appeal for an acceleration of the urban phenomenon and the unlimited expansion of the city alongside, and based on the same logic as, the total emptying of the countryside, which is the other side of a dichotomy that seemed epitomised by literary depictions and a relic-filled imaginary. However, certain current conditions and circumstances – the pandemic, the possibilities for digital nomadism, the gentrification of an ever-broader urban swathe and the economic logic that reserves the city for the wealthy and visitors – have brought the countryside to a place where only the city once seemed to exist. Thus, the classic dichotomy has been revived at a time when the environmental mayhem caused by climate change is forcing us to re-examine the city and the countryside as a whole and not in the polarised terms that modernism has encouraged.

In this dossier ‘City, Countryside’,
we present images from two artists. Thomas Struth is one of the most internationally recognised German photographers. Among his most well-known series of work is one about city streets that may be summarised in a single photograph: Unconscious Places. It is from this series that Struth has chosen the images for
this ‘Subject’ section of Electra.
With a body of work of great originality, the Portuguese painter João Hogan obsessively painted the vastness and harshness of the landscape, its aridity and its silence, often giving his paintings a metaphysical resonance. Some of these images are shown in this dossier.
What these photographs by Struth and paintings by Hogan have in common is the absence of people, thus offering the viewer a contemplation that better reveals the structural elements of the City and the Countryside.

The eminent British art historian and critic Claire Bishop, renowned as one of the leading theorists of the idea of participation in the visual arts and in performance, is about to launch a new book on the problem of attention in contemporary culture over the last thirty years. In conversation with Electra, this professor at City University of New York discusses exhibitions, installations, criticism and dance, exploring the radical ways in which digital technology has been transforming the idea of the spectator.

On the centenary of Clarice Lispector’s birth, Ricardo Domeneck, a Brazilian poet, visual artist and critic based in Berlin, revisits this great Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer and analyses the period in which she lived and how this is reflected in her timeless work. Surprisingly, Domeneck refers to Lispector as ‘political’, in the atypical sense of the word: that which is prior to and predates ‘the city of men’. Her work opens onto other worlds, and its words have a new resonance that brings a seemingly novel beauty to her melancholic and elegant photographs.

In this Scoop, we feature twenty-one previously unpublished drawings by Gonçalo Pena. His work, which combines intensity, abundance and movement, both registers the artist’s presence in the world and captures the reflection of the world on the artist himself. These drawings by this fertile creator of images and signs come from one continuous sketchbook. They are exclamations which speak clearly and enigmatically of the Aristotelian three kingdoms of nature: animal, vegetable and mineral. Like marks left in the passing of time, they bear witness to Gonçalo Pena's roving gaze. The imagination behind the images is his way of putting himself on a level with what is happening in the world.

Yves Citton is the co-director of the journal Multitudes. His point of departure is the distinction between speed and acceleration, in line with Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s #Accelerate: Manifesto, which he translated into French. He sees in collapse, and in the perennial crises in which we live, the only chance of a desirable change. From this point of view, the only suitable strategy for our times consists of accelerating the collapse.

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.