This is the portrait of a great twentieth-century political leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who played a decisive role in the implosion of the East European communist regimes, with consequences that Europe and the world know well. The picture that William Taubman draws here combines his political career with the history of a personal life that makes him a distinctive personality.

Alain Supiot is a professor at the University of Nantes and the Collège de France. He is the author of La gouvernance par les nombres, 2015 [Governance by Numbers, The Making of a Legal Model of allegiance, 2017]. In this article he looks at the long history of governance by law up until the current system of government that is guided by quantification and by numbers – not only in economic terms but also in a social dimension. It is market globalisation and its immanent neoliberal principles that determine the hegemony of numbers in the information age.

Yves Michaud is a prominent author of books on aesthetics, art criticism and political philosophy and has played an important role in public discussions and controversies about contemporary art in France. In this article, he addresses the issue and challenges that art is facing in this age of generalised aestheticisation and puts forward the idea of ‘Protected Aesthetic Zones’ as a fundamental and critical concept in his analysis.

Goddess of goddesses, sphinx of sphinxes, mystery of mysteries, Madame Grès shone brightly in the exclusive world of Parisian haute couture. Her legacy was her ceaseless quest for absolute beauty in her designs. Her long, draped dresses crafted with obsession and technical mastery are a profound reflection on fashion, time and memory. Anabela Becho, a fashion curator and researcher, describes the life and work of this great couturière.

The books of Günther Anders, the German philosopher of technology who saw in the nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the entry into a new era and who diagnosed the ‘obsolescence’ of the human race, are today the object of a rediscovery that makes them current in our time of Artificial Intelligence, the post-human and the rebirth of the nuclear threat.

Critic and historian Hal Foster, one of the most influential and prolific authors on modern and contemporary art, design, architecture, and postmodernism, talks to Electra about the status and function of critical theory in the current political juncture. He revisits the journey which has taken him from the radicalism of the New York intellectual milieu during the 1970s, to the preparation of an upcoming book around the popular idea of a ‘banal aesthetics’.

José Marmeleira, art critic and professor at the School of Arts and Design (Caldas da Rainha), writes about a recent book by Hal Foster, who is one of the most important critics and historians of North American art, a member of October magazine, and already interviewed in Electra (issue 22, Autumn 2023). This book questions the art-criticism binomial.

The encounter and the long-standing dialogue between the Italian critic and essayist Alfonso Berardinelli and the German poet, essayist and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger is an example of an elective affinity rich with ensuing consequences, such as a book by them both: Che noia la poetry. Pronto Soccorso per lettori stressati [What boring poetry. First Aid for stressed readers] (2006). This text by Berardinelli on the essayist Enzensberger prolongs this fruitful encounter.

The ‘Metropolitan’ section of this issue focuses on the relationship between hospitals and the city. Daniela Arnaut, an architect, university professor and researcher of ‘healthcare buildings’ and ‘healing spaces’, reveals a history that is often invisible because it is right in front of our eyes. As the pandemic rages, this essay encourages us to reflect on issues such as environmental hygiene, and asks whether we are witnessing a re-ordering of the urban space.

The writer Gonçalo M. Tavares and the artist-architect collective ‘Os Espacialistas’ [The Spacialists] devote themselves to the pursuit of utopian architectures. They put forward the concept of ‘human machines’, which do not work by necessity or routine but rather by the imagination of the body. This notion, which is distinctly present in the work of both, will be presented in the next two issues of Electra. With this work and this form of publication, we are inaugurating a new section in the magazine – ‘Serial’ – with which we return to the old editorial tradition of securing the readers’ loyalty with the thread of a story told over successive instalments.