Populism – a highly current and rather elastic concept that has been used as a tag for diverse political phenomena of varying provenance – is defined in this article using nine hypotheses. The author, Yves Citton, is a French philosopher with a vast output in the field of political philosophy, a member of the editorial board of Multitudes, and author of Pour une écologie de l’attention and Médiarchie.
 

Rui Manuel Amaral, a writer from Porto, describes and analyses the ‘problem’ — i.e. the problematic — of his city, based on a number of symptoms that he examines with his literarily trained eye. And what he sees are the illusory representations cultivated by its citizens, the real city and the imaginary city, the objectivised Porto and the beautiful phantasmagoria that feeds it in its narcissism.

From the author of the concept of ‘post-democracy’, in a book with the same title, we have an article that revisits the prospective ideas that were developed there. Above all, the tendency to hollow out the notion of democracy and the weakening of democratic institutions are confronted with some current political and economic factors. Colin Crouch, professor at the University of Warwick (England), is a sociologist and scientist.

There is a gruesome scene in Mark Mylod’s famous film The Menu (2022) which takes place in a fine-dining restaurant with few tables and only twelve guests on an obscure and secluded island. At one point, Julian Slowik, the restaurant’s celebrated chef, who prepares a new special menu for his diners each time, full of all sorts of surprises (and not only gastronomic ones), introduces his guests to Jeremy, ‘the good but not great’ sous chef who, after the chef-genius’s spiel concludes, sticks a gun in his mouth and commits suicide.

It was on the notion of post-truth, which the Oxford Dictionary chose as ‘word of the year’ in 2016, that Myriam Revault d'Allonnes wrote her book entitled The Fragile Truth. In this article, the French philosopher, professor emeritus at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, revisits her reflection on this concept to show that it cannot be confused with the traditional lie and to consider its relationship with regards to both democracy and totalitarian regimes.

The causes generally blamed for the crisis facing the press and the malaise in contemporary journalism are many and easy to enumerate. But aside from what are presented as the unstoppable forces of change, there are good grounds for concluding that, within the profession itself and in the way it sees its own calling, something has gone very wrong.
 

Essayist and professor of Mass Communication Semiotics at the University of Alicante, Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz analyses in this text how the privative character of privacy has become social in our time, through media such as Facebook. He shows how converting the intimate and the private into public communication has extended to the political universe.

It was the time when the future was an ism. Technology was making a modern epic out of human labour. It was the time when Fernando Pessoa made this metallic exclamation in the paroxysmal, paradoxical, relentless voice of Álvaro de Campos in the opening words of the verbal spark called Triumphal Ode:

By the painful light of the factory’s huge electric lamps I write in a fever. I write gnashing my teeth, rabid for the beauty of all this, For this beauty completely unknown to the ancients.

O wheels, O gears, eternal r-r-r-r-r-r-r!

The French writer and philosopher Michel Erman is a well-known biographer of Marcel Proust, to whom he has devoted several books. In this original essay, he talks about Proust’s relationship with money and what it represented in his work and life, enabling him to be ‘sometimes a friend and altruist, sometimes distant and domineering’. From the inheritance left to him by his parents to how he used it to assert himself in literature, from the mundane comedy to the means to facilitate amorous and sexual relationships, for Proust money was a tool for understanding the world and everyone’s place in it.

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.