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.

For some time now in Portugal, the word super has been used and abused as a form of emphasis and overstatement. Rightly or not, individuals from certain social and professional groups employ it as a suffix, noun or adjective, augmenting what is being said and, as a consequence, themselves. It can be likened to the urge to exclaim about everything: ‘It’s great!’ This optimistic desire to hyperbolise the world is an interesting symptom that is important to note. The author of this entry of the ‘Dictionary of Received Ideas’ moves on to discuss the semantics of the word super.

In this article, the sociologist João Sedas Nunes, professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Lisbon, focuses on a new category of football supporters, whom he calls ‘post-supporters’, who make use of the principles of irony and critical detachment. For this reason, they no longer fit into the old model, where passion, and even fanaticism, for a club ruled.

In classical Marxist theory, surplus value is defined as the difference between the value of the product of labour and the remuneration that is sufficient to support labour power – a difference that in capitalist regimes is appropriated by capitalist entrepreneurs.In this context, labour is considered a commodity. In actual fact, looked at more closely, labour is not a commodity in Marx’s view, but rather the use value of the unique commodity that is labour power.

‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’

The brief history of the concept of sustainable development is well known. It gained its ‘right to the city’ with the definition quoted above. It was used in the famous 1987 Brundtland Report for the United Nations about the environment and development. Sustainable development made a timid appearance in the 1980 World Conservation Strategy prepared by the IUCN, the largest and most respected biodiversity and nature conservation organisation in the world. Its roots go back much further, however, demonstrating the so-far irreconcilable tension between its two concepts: the dynamic of growth and intensification associated with ‘development’ stands in contrast to the idea of balance and durability associated with the adjective ‘sustainable’.

The US author, professor and critic Svetlana Alpers, whose ground-breaking work redefined the field of art history in the last decades, has recently been awarded the 2023 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art by the College Art Association of America. In this conversation with Electra, Svetlana Alpers reflects on a lifetime spent thinking and writing about looking, revisiting the journey that has taken her from her early studies on Tiepolo, Rembrandt, and Rubens, to her most recent interest in both photographic images and autobiographical writing.

The central theme of this issue of Electra is Taste. To open this discussion, we might say that it is difficult to recognise a value of universal truth in the Latin maxim De gustibus non est disputandum – in matters of taste there can be no disputes – from the moment (that moment being the 18th century) when the world of taste replaced the world of beauty that had prevailed since Antiquity.

This article by Filomena Silvano, professor at NOVA University of Lisbon and author of the book Antropologia da Moda [Anthropology of Fashion], is about the relationship between taste and fashion and the construction of ourselves through the way we dress, extending into a reflection on the epochal transformations in the way fashion functions.

‘Adolescence’ is a psycho-sociological category that appeared in the early 20th century and provided America and Europe with projections of wellbeing, education and progress. As a result, young people gained an important status. They became the subject of a new culture whose history is recounted in this article by Jon Savage, a British journalist and music critic. He is also the author of Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875–1945 and Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, as well as other books about pop and punk-rock music and culture, including a history of the Sex Pistols.

The writer, literary critic and literature professor Éric Marty – author of Bref séjour à    Jérusalem – recounts his wanderings around Tel Aviv. He focuses on the city’s modernity and cosmopolitanism, which endow Israel with a different face than the one revealed by Jerusalem.