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In this Scoop, we feature twenty-one previously unpublished drawings by Gonçalo Pena.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.

Comfortable is used in the interrogative form: are you comfortable? The question never denotes an intimate relationship between those who ask and those who answer (in love, comfort does not help). Are you comfortable with the rules of the company, for example, or with something that I said that you might disapprove of? We ask in the affirmative about what we imagine might upset or offend. Are you comfortable with the place you are expected to occupy, instead of are you comfortable with the place you are not expected to leave? This bond is not horizontal, it is skewed. Those who ask are in the position to provide comfort or discomfort, a remnant of the power held by the feudal lord over the life and death of his serfs. Letting them live granted him automatic magnanimity.

A memory: in the 1980s, at the annual conference of American art historians, which in that particular year saw thousands of scholars gathering in the heart of Texas, a young ‘deconstructor’ after the Derrida model began his presentation without slides (used and abused by all the other speakers) and with the words, ‘No pictures, just concepts!’ The stunned audience shifted nervously in their seats.

The notion of democracy cannot be easily established nor fixed in a strict and rigorous manner. But, according to Paulo Tunhas, professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto and columnist of the Observador newspaper, there are a few conditions common to all so-called democratic regimes, without which they cease to be democratic. These conditions are named and defined in this text.

The verb to contaminate, from Latin contaminare (‘to deteriorate by mingling, to sully, to defile by touching’), lends itself to discursive resourcefulness producing a fair range of specific uses, from a particular action on food, water or the environment to politics or language and literary processes.

In one of his diaries, Kafka warned, ‘You don’t need to leave your room. Stay sitting at your desks and listen. You don’t even need to listen; just wait. You don’t need to wait; just stay still, silent, alone. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.’ The two diaries that we have published in this edition are by the photographer Daniel Blaufuks and the visual artist Mariana Silva. They are about the lockdown that has been imposed on us by the Covid-19 pandemic. They are based on two places on lockdown in a world held prisoner by the virus and fear: near Lisbon for him; New York for her. In these two ‘Books of Hours’, Blaufuks and Silva look at the world through a window that looks from outside in. But this window was not presented to them on a platter. They were the ones that opened it with a look that thinks, sees, speaks. Was it not also Kafka who said, ‘Man does not grow upwards, but from inside out.’?

The Italian sociologist Paolo Perulli, with an extensive body of work in urban development, logistics and territory, traces a genealogy and history of the ‘creatives’, who maintain a necessary link to large cities, but who, in their heterogeneity, can hardly be defined as an autonomous social group.