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.

This manuscript is by the French poet and essayist Christophe Hanna. He has written a book entitled Argent (Éditions Amsterdam, 2018), whose characters are identified by their first names plus their monthly salary. It was penned on the basis of topics sent to him by the editor of Electra, which he has reduced to subtitles. The poet, who makes no distinction between poetry and theory, has made money an inherent part of his actual writing.

The Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato has written a lot about the way in which capitalism in our time consists of producing ‘the indebted man’. Here he elaborates on the theory that the economy became entirely political for the first time after debt-currency appeared. It was created by the banks out of nothing, after Richard Nixon announced in 1971 that the US dollar would be leaving the gold standard.

The other day, while out on my short daily walk designed to enable me to cope with working from home without a self-certificate or exemption form, my eyes drifted downwards as I thought of the prisoners who end up losing their sight as they are never able to look as far as the horizon. In solidarity with them, I stared at the edge of the pavement in front of me, and caught sight of an orange rectangle. I picked it up. To my surprise, it looked just like a €50 bank note. I was already rejoicing in this modest treasure when I noticed that it differed from the notes I was used to; it was decorated with a female figure – not an allegory of the Republic, Fertility or Justice, half-naked and wearing a Roman tunic, like most of the female figures on bank notes.

Taking as her starting point cases that have caused some scandal, in this article sociologist Gisèle Sapiro raises the question, which is also the title of her book, Peut-on dissocier l'oeuvre de l'auteur? [Can we separate the work from the author?] and advances in the possible answers (which vary according to the cases) to another complex question: what to do with the work when its author's personal conduct is objectionable?

The best questions answer themselves. What happened between the first editorial we published and the one that is now being written? A journal happened – this journal, which the inaugural text discussed much as Hamlet speaks of his father’s ghost. Electra was written, published, read, and seen; it was reported and reviewed.

We live under the imperial rule of narratives. That is certainly not new. Homo sapiens have always been indistinguishable from homo fabulator, but in the post-truth era, narrative imperialism has grown and intensified (recall that ‘post truth’ was declared word of the year in 2016 by Oxford Dictionaries).

Natalia Ginzburg was not just an important Italian writer, but also an intellectual who came through times of war and tragedy with a political and cultural commitment and sense of responsibility common to other writers of her generation. The collection of essays in The Little Virtues (a 1962 book that has recently been translated into Portuguese and published by Relógio D'Água) on which Golgona Anghel writes, paints us a picture of the literary, political and family world in which Natalia Ginzburg played such an important role.

In this interview, the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich, author of Ce que n’est pas l’identité, defends ‘universalism’ against the specificities of identity. Her public opinions have involved her in huge controversies. They can be explained by the way in which these issues, which were regarded for a long time by French intellectuals as a nefarious product of studies by American universities, have recently ignited a veritable ‘civil war’.

The territory of modern and contemporary art today is dominated by institutions that engage in the symbolic transfer of a new ‘aura’ of art to luxury products and vice-versa. The result is the colossal circulation of money around the works and artists involved in speculation on inflated products.