A book on the moral discourse of merchandise, on commodities as ‘goods’, presented by its translator, who was also its co-editor.

You hear it and you immediately want to sing along. You want to sing even though you’re tone deaf and you’re not singing out loud: just silently and to yourself. The Catalogue Aria and the opera in which it features – Don Giovanni, with music by Mozart and libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte – are high points in the history of the musical theatre genre, which first appeared in Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Even in the present day there are numerous variations that surprise and delight.

Catherine Millet is a writer, a curator and the editor of the magazine Art Press, of which she was the founder. In 1968, she began as an art critic for the cultural weekly Lettres Françaises, under the editorship of Louis Aragon. It is one of this writer’s passages that Millet has selected for comment, making it a lever with which she raises her world. On the basis of the quotation from Aragon, whose lack of verbal propriety causes an erotic thrill, Millet – the author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M., the book that made her name among the general public – provocatively declares her infallibly controversial ideas on women and their relationship with men. In her commentary, Millet carries on a controversy marked by violent anathemas and virulent accusations, with echoes that are still present.

Marcos Cardão, historian and researcher of mass and popular culture phenomena, writes about the significance of the National Pantheon honours granted to Eusébio, one year after his death, which immortalised him in this temple of national memory.

Taking as her starting point the exhibition Earthkeeping/Earthshaking – Arte, feminismos e ecologia, shown at Galeria Quadrum in Lisbon, the curator and researcher Margarida Mendes writes about the cultural themes and ethics it deals with artistically and which lie at the heart of contemporary debates.

The traditional categories of modern politics are now inadequate. The foundations of the very notion of democracy are undermined, while the words inherited from modernity, which had once served political action and political ideas, are now devoid of sense.

Numbers are the code of universal harmony, divine creation, magic, and also of scientific rationality, calculation and method. Cryptic knowledge is perfectly expressed in numbers, as if they were the emanation of a mathematical God. Our age pays little heed to numerology, but is obsessed with quantification and statistics, which have become the main tool of governance, rankings, ratings and generalised evaluation as a way of managing human and material resources. It is precisely because numbers are now so dominant and powerful (to the extent that politics has become a mere province of the wider economy), that Electra is devoting the ‘Subject’ section of this issue to this area. Here you will find articles about the philosophy of number, forms of digital art, modern governance through numbers, and the history of algorithms and their function in digital networks. These compulsory stops shine light on a variety of incursions into a vast universe that continues to expand in our age - the digital age. All the images dedicated to Numbers in this issue are by António Sena. Throughout a career that spans over five decades, signs, numbers and letters represent his attempts – successful or not – to interpret the world and everything that happens in it. His work also questions the demands, potentialities and illusions of human communication in all its variety of languages. In inviting António Sena to collaborate, Electra recognises an artist who, through his intellectual research and artistic practice, and integrity and persistence, has created a body of work with a considerable formal coherence that is unique in the world of contemporary art.

‘Fame’ – is the central theme of this 11th issue of Electra. We begin with a very brief metalinguistic presentation: the word has recently become slightly anachronistic, referring it seems to something which radiates from the public sphere with characteristics that are no longer those which dominate under the all-encompassing influence of the media. Hence, today we call ‘famous’ people ‘media personalities’, and at the margins of the latest mechanisms of visibility there is really nothing that could be described as ‘fame’. If anything, there are those who benefit from the short-term prestige granted and recognised by a small section of the public and their peers. ‘Media personality’ is the term used to describe someone who frequently appears in the media. Not occasionally but constantly, on media where every appearance is profane – this is the form that fame now almost exclusively takes.

Political communication researcher Susana Salgado comments on a quote from Noel Gallagher, former Oasis vocalist. She warns that, ‘emotions trump facts’ in these times of ‘over-democratisation of the individual’.

The neo-liberal market presents itself as a cosmos, an order, in the sense that it governs individual conduct and therefore requires an anthropological approach. Thus, it actualises the concept that humans will never be the masters of their own destiny and presupposes that everything is quantifiable and therefore subject to governance by algorithm. This is the theory set out and developed by philosopher Dario Gentili, a professor at Roma Tre University and author of among others, the book Crisi come arte di governo [Crisis as an Art of Government]; a genealogy of the concept of crisis.