Football stirs up such passion in so many people that some have called the phenomenon ‘football fever’. This sport, which has taken over from all others and conquered the world, deserves to be regarded from an analytical and critical point of view, without any empty, unnecessary ‘fevers’. Football today is a very powerful, complex ‘system’ that goes far beyond stadiums and championships and has invaded our everyday lives, even if we are not actually fans. Football is so expansive and plays such an important role in daily routine that it has far overflowed stadiums. It attracts political power and has an extreme, exaggerated crystallising effect on manifestations of economic and media power. It is a world of heroes and cults that are mostly ephemeral and subject to money circulation laws. Glory generally runs fast here and stops for no-one. The anthropological significance of football as a show, a competition and a ritual is a challenge that requires intricate analysis.

Football has become a social reality of our time. You may never have set foot in a stadium or kept up to date with match results or league rankings. You may know the names of only a few players – those that you cannot ignore – and you may be underwhelmed by the spectacular brilliance of their universal presence. Even so, you cannot imagine a public space without football, because it is everywhere, all the time. There are even those who regard it as an infection that spreads throughout the body of society or believe it to be a new, equally alienating ‘opium of the people’.

Marc Perelman, professor at Paris-Nanterre University, is the author of an extensive bibliography about what he describes as a ‘barbaric sport’ and the way it extends beyond the stadiums. Le football, une peste émotionnelle (2006), written with the sociologist Jean-Marie Brohm, is one of his most famous books. In this article, he analyses and criticises football as an organised institution, as well as the benevolent blindness of intellectuals regarding this sport.

Young ideals were one of the driving forces behind the social, cultural and political history of the 20th century. These days, there is no longer a place for the ideals that were once a young people’s prerogative. What has triumphed today is youth as an ideal and aspiration, i.e. young style and its culture. This desire, which has ceased to belong to an age-group, and the difficulties of access to full adulthood have rendered the borders between generational categories more fluid and opened up an injustice between generations. Many of the privileges that adults enjoyed no longer exist for the younger generation. The very large share that the idea of youth holds in the social and aesthetic market does not correspond to young people’s actual situation. In some ways, they are a robbed generation and, on the other, only they are fit to keep up with the times, which have been accelerating at breakneck speed. This dossier covers these issues.

The long-awaited publication of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality adds a new issue to those already existing: the theological debates on sex in the first centuries of Christianity. Art historian and literary critic João Oliveira Duarte highlights the importance that Foucault lent to the idea of desire and the object of desire in Christian questions about sexuality.

Estes dois textos sobre Lisboa desenvolvem temas tratados no âmbito do projecto «Fragmentação e Reconfiguração: A experiência da cidade entre arte e filosofia», em particular no programa de rádio «Ruas de Sentido Único», concebido por Maria Filomena Molder e os dois autores destes textos: Nuno Fonseca, que escreve sobre a paisagem sonora de Lisboa, e Nélio Conceição, que trata aqui das imagens e representações da cidade. Estes textos foram escritos pouco tempo antes de ser declarada a pandemia, que afectou significativamente o estado de coisas que eles descrevem, confirmando assim uma ideia presente no texto de Nuno Fonseca: a de que a paisagem sonora tem uma temporalidade dinâmica e uma historicidade.

Historian Francisco Bethencourt’s vast work on the history of racism (or rather racisms) is in many ways entangled with highly topical issues of identity, such as those linked to post-colonial theories and thought on decolonisation. This interview with the current holder of the Charles Boxer Chair at King’s College Department of History, in London, took the form of written questions and answers.

An important Italian thinker in the ‘autonomist’ tradition, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has written lucidly on the labour system and on how meaning and value are produced in the age of cognitive capitalism. This interview, conducted in Lisbon after a talk at the Teatro do Bairro Alto, takes us on a brief excursion through these theoretical territories.

François Hartog is a professor of Greek and modern historiography at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He is a historian who has also undertaken a substantial amount of important theoretic reflection on basic issues of historiography and the different ways of experiencing time that define each age. The thinking of history as a discipline and the actual concept of history are important contributions that Hartog has made and that extend to the entire field of human sciences.

During Franz Kafka’s lifetime (1883–1924), the situation changed with respect to the German language in Prague. In 1880, Prague and its suburbs still had almost 42,000 German-speaking inhabitants, some 15% of the total population. By 1900, the number had fallen to 33,776, or 7.5% of Prague’s population, including the suburbs. Of these 34,000 or so German speakers in Prague, an estimated 40% were Jews.