Money is not just a more or less fleeting and increasingly abstract universal medium. It is the cornerstone of society and its political administration, over which it has today total control. It is not a subject whose boundaries can be delimited though, as it is expanding in all directions. It travels round the planet at the speed of light and takes up all the space. Economics and financial sciences have only partial knowledge of money and it is a complete mystery to common mortals. If we want to find out a little more about it, we have to call upon other skills and disciplines that go beyond the discourse and concepts that have invaded our daily lives: psychoanalysis, anthropology, literature and art. This was what we did when putting this dossier together. We asked for contributions from a wide variety of sources, so that we could look at the very essence of money. And it is because its power is everywhere and determines everything, even when it cannot be seen, that it is so often the subject of metaphysical and theological theories and concepts. Or if we want to turn to pagan ideas, let us say that money is the ultimate shaman that we can call on in this completely secularised world.

When can an opinion be a crime? What are the limits to the freedom of expression? At what point does my freedom end because someone else’s begins? These questions have been raised in our times with an urgency that stems from the need to square the freedom of thought and of expression in public (nowadays on the social media as well) with the prevention of threats of whose danger and seriousness history makes us aware. On these clearly topical questions, the Spanish writer and journalist Francisco Alba and the Portuguese lawyer and criminologist Rui Patrício pen their ideas.

It was as if speed, which was the subject that had been planned and announced long ago for this edition, had morphed into the image of our perplexity and blended into the measure of our distance from things. This edition of Electra was ready to go to print when life changed completely. Suddenly spaces closed and time turned about face, pulling tomorrow into today and slowly leading today into tomorrow.

Among the many names that have been used to describe the society in which we live, a matter that also involves issues within the realms of theory (the society of the spectacle, society of simulacra, risk society, etc.), there might be yet another very important name: the society of speed and acceleration. The technical acceleration of modernity, which in recent times has reached a state of paroxysm at the limit of the speed of light thanks to information and digital technologies, has become the most decisive phenomenon not only in social and cultural change but also in the way we live our lives. The experience of time, as marked by acceleration, has become a vertiginous spiral. Everything, from the circulation of money to information, from work rules to leisure activities, takes place at a speed that is increasing relentlessly. This has led to two emblematic diseases of our time. One, burnout, is physical and psychological and the other is socio-political in nature and bears an old name in new clothes, alienation. Appeals have been made to slow down, for the sake of our health and that of our planet. But it was not these appeals that caused a spectacular break in this movement that everyone believed to be irreversible unless there were some kind of natural catastrophe. The slowdown has come in the guise of a virus that has spread all over the world. It was enough for us to experience in practice what we already knew in theory: in the world that we live in, reducing speed brings everything falling down round our ears. Because speed is a total social phenomenon, we have chosen it as the ‘Subject’ for this edition of Electra.

These two indirectly conflicting articles speak different languages. They are an eloquent example of a disagreement (i.e. two languages that do not have a common measure) raised by the issue of 'race'. The first is by Vasco M. Barreto, a biologist and researcher at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. The second is by Pedro Schacht Pereira who has a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian studies from Brown University in the United States and often writes about racism in the Portuguese press. Anthony Appiah, an important figure in cultural studies, once said, 'It is time for the biological concept of race to disappear without a trace.' But, as Barreto's article shows, the concept has not disappeared and its traces are still appearing in scientific debates. This debate is far from the 'scientific' racism prior to the Second World War, but still raises controversies, reservations and hesitations. On the contrary, from the point of view of post-colonial studies, it is just a discursive category. And it is precisely on the assumption of race as a discursive construction within a culture and a language that Pedro Schacht Pereira bases the issue of racism in a work by Eça de Queirós.

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.’?

This question was raised after the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded, rather controversially, to Peter Handke, who publicly defended the former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. In this section, two authors give us their response: the critic, essayist and translator João Barrento, and the writer and director of the French journal Lignes, Michel Surya. João Barrento reviews a series of problematic ‘cases’ in the art and literature of the twentieth century to demonstrate the complexity of the issue and the different answers that he has obtained; Michel Surya asserts quite radically that great literature, ever the subject of scandal, knows no limits.

Stupidity is of all times but each time has its own stupidity. Flaubert inspired us by defining the forms of a stupidity that is neither the eternal nor the timeless type. Instead, this stupidity appears as the symptom of an age, lending it its features — i.e. the platitudes, preconceptions, and worn-out words that form, in their rigidity and conceit, manifestations as hard as rock. In our time of artificial intelligence, the purpose here is to highlight, analyse, and question some of the figures of contemporary stupidity, which cannot be entirely identified without us turning to another word of the same semantic field: idiocy.

The effects of May 1968 can be found in many current forms of struggle and revolt, where a new political awareness is being manifested — proof that the movement which erupted in Paris precisely 50 years ago had a highly mobilizing effect and cannot be reduced to a meaningless event: this is what American historian Kristin Ross shows us.

The relationship between the public sphere and privacy has been completely changed in our time, similarly to what happens in the relationship between the individual (that invention of the Enlightenment) and society.