Sometime before the night between 1st and 2nd November, 1975, when he was brutally murdered, Pier Paolo Pasolini met with the English journalist Peter Dragadze, with whom he had maintained a dialogue for six years and to whom he had given many interviews. On that day, Dragadze showed him a few papers, where he had gathered Pasolini’s opinions on various topics, explaining that they would become part of a long article devoted to the poet’s life and work. Pasolini seized the notes, took them with him, and a few days later, in the last encounter with his English friend (who he affectionately called ‘a pest’), he returned them to him saying: ‘This is almost a spiritual and intellectual testament. If anything happens, Dragadze, publish it. I think that some people might find it interesting.’ Two weeks later, the text was published in the weekly newspaper Gente with the title ‘Almost a testament’.

Coming out controversially against the commonest ideas about tourists, which generally regard them as ridiculous, grotesque figures, Didier Urbain, a sociologist and ethnologist, and author of L’idiot du voyage: histoires de touristes, criticises the arguments put forward by the detractors of tourism and considers them representatives of the true travel experience of our times who should not be disparaged.

The Covid-19 pandemic and its consequences on our lives drag on, becoming a ‘normal abnormal’, with their tragic melancholy and despairing monotony. In his novel The Plague, a classic of existentialist literature written as a chronicle of daily life during an epidemic, the writer Albert Camus uses the topics of illness, contagion and fear to create a powerful philosophical meditation on human behaviour. An essayist and chronicler, Sebastian Dieguez is a neuroscientist at the University of Freiburg who, in his research, has focused on the relationship between psychology, cognitive sciences and literature. In this issue, he reviews a passage from Camus’ book.

It was not the match of the century, but it came close. Donald Trump vs. Democracy has not been turned into a great book like Norman Mailer’s The Fight, published in the U.S. in 1975 and inspired by the 1974 Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman match, but it has something in common with all good novels: magnetic characters who silently carry the weight of their time.

Martin Jay is professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His extensive work, which spans several disciplines, encompasses the fields of critical cultural theory, philosophy, sociology and visual culture. He is the author of a book on the use of lies in politics, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics, and it is precisely this subject that this article deals with.

Anthropologist José Gabriel Pereira Bastos explains money from an anthropological and psychoanalytical point of view, relating it to a symbolic kind of organisation centring on the power of the Father, as he is celebrated in rituals of communities in which magical thinking prevails. From there it is possible to turn not only to Freud but also to anthropology to understand money and its original, archetypical function, in the light of trans-historical laws, taboos and bans.

In this article, Swiss geographer Joëlle Salomon Cavin, professor at the University of Lausanne, takes up a topic that has been the privileged object of her research: hostility towards the city, in the Swiss context, inscribed in a history and a culture but which covid-19 has caused to emerge with greater force.

The dossier of this edition of Electra speaks of our age by speaking of food. Food is a global feature of our times, ever present as we strive for goals that always seem out of reach. Food seduces and bewitches, rallies and mobilises, fascinates and even sparks obsession. And, in some parts of the world, it is often in short supply. (...)

In the view of Italian philosopher Federico Leoni, the novel coronavirus cannot be regarded simply from the perspective of its very obvious effects of deceleration and shut-down, as, on the contrary, it has also been a factor of acceleration for certain ongoing movements that relate specifically to our times.

The protection of politicians’ private lives, by means of an insurmountable ‘wall’, has a long history, full of polemic and debate, especially in France, where the illusion of a ‘model’ was created, but later broken by the phenomenon of peopolisation, i.e. media coverage in the manner of people magazine. It is about this long history, passing through some important episodes, that the historian Christian Delporte writes.