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.

This beautiful and original evocation of Moscow, written for Electra, recalls different eras, political and cultural figures, memorable events and places of worship. The writer’s personal history intersects with that of the city and of a world that played out its destiny there. And it also talks of Eusébio and Port wine. The author, Yuri Slezkine, is a renowned historian and translator, born in Russia, who has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Oxford. He is considered to be one of the world's leading experts on Russian history and has a book on the subject regarded as a work of reference.

Narcissism as a generalised social phenomenon that marks our time is a complex that gives rise to a psychosociological description. It manifests itself through the proliferation of images and reflections that use many media at its disposal (new technologies, the modern ‘machines of vision’ and communication, social media) to guarantee its basic needs: to exhibit and multiply itself. You do not need to know much about social psychology to understand that narcissism and its variants are responsible for this egotistical inflation and determine some of the characteristics that shape social life: hedonism, individualism, the culture of the instant turned exclusively towards well-being, the cult of celebrities, the triumph of images. These are characteristics that seep into the political milieu like a fluid. This is clearly visible everywhere in our current political panorama, reaching extreme forms in the rise and triumph of clowns who fascinate voters with their well-known ‘therapies’ and ultimately become heads of government. Although they are susceptible to a different gaze that requires other tools of analysis, identitarian claims are not strange to this culture.

Sinziana Ravini, art critic, novelist, psychoanalyst, and co-editor of Paletten, an art magazine published in Gothenburg, Sweden, writes about the narcissistic processes in contemporary art – Marina Abramovic occupies a prominent place here – in which the artist is the raw material of their own work.

The myth of Narcissus and its literary variations: this is the theme of António Bracinha Vieira's article, which brings together science (anthropology, psychoanalysis), classical mythology and literature. It is always within these vast territories without disciplinary borders that he also moves as a writer, using the name António Vieira.