Jovan Mrvaljevic was born in Montenegro but lives in Paris. His contribution to this dossier is an article about the art world’s relationship with the luxury industry and the star system, creating an environment marked by the programmes of large institutions.

For the last two decades, at least, we have got used to listening to a chorus of pessimistic voices, to which we attribute an ever increasing value of truth, which tell us about the ‘crisis of democracy’, ‘the unease in/of democracy’, the ailing ‘state of democracy’ and even the need to categorise it as ‘post’ to suggest that it has become necessary to update it conceptually.

It is said that while in Madrid to open an exhibition of his work they took him to the Prado Museum, which he had never visited before. He passed through the vast rooms with fleeting steps and set gestures, where from the walls the works of Velázquez and Goya, Fra Angelico and Rafael, Bosch and Dürer, van der Weyden and Caravaggio cast their forms and colours, lines and lights. This swift visit was barely enough for a distracted, distant glance at the masterpieces that time has selected to show us. It took no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. At the end of this whirlwind-visit, he went into the museum-shop and looked around for more than half an hour. With keen attention, care and curiosity, he examined, among other products and gadgets, the reproductions and replicas, posters and prints of the works whose originals he could not be bothered with. Such was Andy Warhol ...

Abjection, with its violent effects on the viewer, has become the matrix of a trend in contemporary cinema. It includes forms of representation that, in their excess, work as instruments of torture. And that excess raises problems, which are not only aesthetic but also ethical and political.

The French philosopher and sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie explores in this article why the object of his intellectual investment was never literature, but theory. This personal taste of his has provided him with a reason to analyse the attraction of theory, both in terms of knowledge and of libido.

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.