These celebrities, as they are defined, and as they define themselves, are of various types, and do quite different things. They range from presenters, actors and TV anchors to politicians and comedians; from coaches and footballers to influencers and bloggers; from singers to reality show participants and socialites; and from commentators to chefs. What connects them and what they have in common is that they all appear on television, in magazines and on social media, and are thus well-known and above all recognised.

This list, comprising all that is semblance and appearance, could be infinitely expanded. This is the world that produces the harmonious cacophony of faces and voices that populate public space as if it were exclusively their own.

This is the world that rings every day with raucous laughter, piercing shrieks, dramatic gestures, categorical opinions and repetitive wisecracks. This is the world, shaped by greed and vulgarity, that seethes with daily manifestations of unbridled narcissism, unrestrained exhibitionism and relentless vanity.

This is the world of people who show themselves, every day, doing what was once not shown: sleeping, eating, getting dressed, putting on make-up, dating, cooking, driving, working out. This is the world of those who, every day, exhibit their families, animals, houses, cars and swimming pools. This is the world that supplies us each day with news, rumours, intrigues, rivalries, betrayals, revenge, lies and denials. This is the world where it doesn’t matter how you came, saw or conquered; how you get ahead, make money, win a place, get the prize. This is the world where everything is faked: image, success, career, morality, happiness, faith.

This is the world where celebrities and their public infantilise each other, watching each other like children playing a game in order to mutually validate their roles. This is the world of fame for fame’s sake.

As Flaubert said of stupidity (the ‘Subject’ of Electra 2), there is fame in every era, but each era has its own kind of fame. Which is the fame of our era (the ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra)? And who are these famous men and women who today, wish to force their images on us, set fashions, act as role models?

Some might ask with forlorn indignation: how have these celebrities been bestowed such power and importance that the highest state representatives run after them, with a complicity that could easily be interpreted as kowtowing to them? How is it that the desire to win popularity from someone who is popular doesn’t become a form of populism? How is it that the popularity without honour that they latch onto doesn’t dishonour the posts that they occupy or the positions they hold?

How is it possible that our era and our world have allowed themselves to be represented by these figures who turn mediocrity into an advantage? How is it possible that this vulgar fame has become the aura that thrills our age, the crank that raises our world aloft, the elevator that takes us to the very top of the social tower?

If fame was once the endorsement of superiority, the authentication of greatness and the attestation of glory, how is it that we have replaced superiority with inferiority, greatness with smallness, and glory with a failure to earn it?

Andy Warhol was timid: when he imagined the moment in which we would all have our fifteen minutes of fame, he didn’t imagine that some would have not fifteen, but fifteen thousand or even fifteen million minutes of such easy fame.

There are those, nevertheless, who see in all this an inevitable democratisation and egalitarian levelling that, in mass culture and the society of the spectacle, puts an end to the separation between high and low culture, between the elite and the common people, between the privileged and everyday mortals. And so, the worldwide middle class and the global petit bourgeoisie are the foothills from which the mountain of this new fame rises vigorously and vengefully.

We know that the desire to be famous has been present in every era. Ever since man perceived himself as man (or maybe even before), he has wanted to be known and celebrated, proclaimed and recognised.

Celebrity is born of myth, and it clings on to that myth, growing on it as ivy grows on walls. The first great celebrities of the west, with a beauty formed of divine splendour and animal danger, were created by the mythical imagination: Helen of Troy, daughter of Zeus and Leda, who provoked conflicts, wars and deaths; Achilles the weak-heeled, son of Peleus and Thetis, friend of Patroclus and hero of the Iliad; and Ulysses, son of Laertes and Anticlea, King of Ithaca and cunning hero of the Odyssey. Jorge Luis Borges said that the Iliad and the Odyssey live on in the human heart because they speak of a war and a journey – and life is a war and a journey.

Fame and legend were bestowed on these founding figures by Homer, whose own legend and fame were founded on a shadowy, uncertain and mythical existence. Then came Herostratus, whom Fernando Pessoa used as the title of a text in which he pondered celebrity, genius and immortality. Over 2,400 years ago, the young Herostratus set fire to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. His deranged and successful plan to ignite this blaze was for people to talk about him, thus bringing him renown and immortality.

The history of fame and celebrity is one of the most revealing of the many stories and counter-stories that make up human history. It is a mirage that traverses the long mirrored corridors of the centuries, where humans stare at themselves with an avid and anxious gaze.

In Histoire de la célébrité [History of Celebrity], – echoing the theories of the anthropologist, historian and philosopher René Girard – Georges Minois writes about mimetic desire, depicting the subject-mediator-object triangle:

And on the changes that our age has wrought upon fame, and the changes of our age revealed by fame, Minois says:

Certain key works can help observe what is happening and understand the nature of this fame that has become more famous than all the fames of the past. These include Émile Durkheim’s The Role of Great Men in History; Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle; Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process, The Court Society and The Decline of Court Art; Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life; René Girard’s Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat; Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and The Fashion System; Umberto Eco’s Apocalypse Postponed and The Myth of Superman; Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind; George Steiner’s The Barbarism of Ignorance; Gilles Lipovetsky’s The Era of Emptiness, The Empire of Fashion, Eternal Luxury, The Aestheticization of the World and Pleasing and Touching; Anthony Giddens’s The Transformation of Intimacy; and Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character and The Fall of Public Man.

And there are, of course, the literary works of Homer, Plutarch, Tacitus, Suetonius, Machiavelli, Vasari, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Saint-Simon, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Eça de Queiroz, Wilde, Proust, Musil, Mann, Scott Fitzgerald, Capote and Kundera. There are also films such as Sunset Boulevard by Billy Wilder; A Star is Born by George Cukor; Belissima by Luchino Visconti; Celebrity by Woody Allen; Ginger and Fred by Federico Fellini; Celebrity by Ninì Grassia; Barton Fink by the Coen Brothers; Fame by Alan Parker, which spawned a television series of the same name; The Truman Show by Peter Weir, and almost all of Pedro Almodóvar’s films, including Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, High Heels, The Flower of my Secret and Pain and Glory.

Ultimately, perhaps this new cult of fame, which gives our age an imaginary without imagination, can be understood through a concept developed by the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In the book entitled Mediocrity and Delusion, in which he talks about the death of literature, he names its assassins: ‘secondary illiterates’. The ‘primary illiterates’, whom he praises, do not know how to read or write, but they have a certain wisdom. In them, with the oral transmission that they safeguard, lies the origin of literature. ‘Secondary illiterates’, who do not recognise themselves as such, know how to read and write (albeit with errors), but they have become reduced to imitating the language of the mass media, and are a kind of audiovisual common herd. Their descendants today might be called the digital audiovisual common herd, or tertiary illiterates. They are technologically fast and proficient, constantly connected digital natives, informed polyglots, au fait with the latest technological innovations, gadgets, tools and fashions – yet they use all this to create an ‘unculture’, and their attitudes belong to a world where everything appears and everything disappears, nothing lasts; where everyone has but nobody is. While they have every quality, they are men and women without quality.

This digital audiovisual common herd is the proletariat of fame and the famous. It sells them its labour of veneration (and sometimes aversion) and the famous keep the profits. This society is also riven by a vehement and cruel class struggle.

In our age, it is not only people, but also objects and products, brands and gadgets, platforms and records, events and avatars, virtual images and search engines, robots and applications, that are famous. It is as if, for our hectic, sleepwalking times, fame were the thing that papers over the cracks and the continuum that covers the lack of continuity.

This is the age in which, as fame becomes ever more valuable, everything that it presents and represents loses value. This is the age in which almost nothing that glitters is gold. This is the age in which more is less. This is the age in which fame is the sister of kitsch, and kitsch is the uncle of the famous. This is the age of a new syndrome: the horror of anonymity.

‘Celebrity is a plebeianism. [...] One must be very brutish to become a celebrity at will’, said Fernando Pessoa over one hundred years ago. With a rare moral vindictiveness, Pessoa wrote an essay on celebrity, and on the viscous greed that oozes from it. It is a kind of declaration of existential principles and a manifesto against the vulgarity of the world, rendered as discreet disdain and surreptitious revolt. The almost spiritual tone reveals the metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic resonance that Pessoa gave to the matter. This elegant and contemptuous text is commented on by the poet Manuel de Freitas in the article ‘Passages’ in this edition.

‘They’re super famous!’ This is the age in which the suffix super, which can also be used as a noun or adjective, flits all over the place like a buzzing insect; it exaggerates, elevates, pesters, upgrades… Fame is the super-cherry on the cake of narcissistic megalomania. The ‘Dictionary of Received Ideas’ in this issue discusses this invasive and irritating word super.

Fame is the art of the mirror and of its stage (in the Lacanian sense). No celebrity is immune to the constant selfie, and there is no TV news anchor who would not like to make the news themselves.

In the world of the media, which sees itself as a superior caste or an endogamous tribe in which members hastily shack up and split up with each other, thus doubling their celebrity capital, one belongs so as not to be excluded, and one excludes in order to belong.

This world is a club where, even in public, everyone is emphatically familiar with one another, reinforcing a sense of belonging and of sharing, of intimacy and family, of exclusivity and exclusion. This is a world in which some of its famous inhabitants speak about themselves in the third person; and in which others use the first person to say: ‘I, as a public figure...’ This is a world that, the more open it seems, the more closed it is. Its power is never potential, it is real. There is no pause, it is always a race. It is never a being, it is always a becoming.

These famous men and women never stop propagating and publicising where they are and where they go to on social media. They have never heard the eloquent response that an old aristocrat gave to a bourgeois arriviste who would reel off a daily list of the places he had been to: parties, dinners, lunches, teas, receptions, shows, clubs, horse races. One day, the aristocrat turned to him and, in an apparently neutral tone, yet with a supercilious smirk, shot back at him: my dear Sir, a gentleman is not defined by the places he goes to, but by those he refuses to...

The choice of Fame as the ‘Subject’ of Electra 11 is a recognition that in this phenomenon, contemporary temptations and tendencies, ambitions and delusions, complexes and repressions are pulled together and pushed apart. By detecting them and questioning them, by ‘reading them’ and interpreting them, we are seeing an image and listening to a voice that tells us (sometimes, a contrario sensu) what we are, what we seem to be and how we appear.

This ‘Subject’ is like a roaming, nervous spotlight that highlights or throws into shadow those who tirelessly and relentlessly jostle for places in the vertical and vertiginous race for fame. At the centre of this open stage on which the curtain has now been raised and where bodies and images become confused, we see behind the mask of celebrity, the cruel face of a time that we call ours, but which, like fame, betrays and eludes us.

*Translated by Lucy Phillips