The increasingly volatile nature of the value of money and of money itself, which requires stability above all else, means we are just waiting for the next financial collapse. The philosopher Yves Citton uses this statement to expand on seven ‘lessons’ that need to be taken from this situation, which gives rise to a kind of ‘collapsology’. These seven ‘stories’ or ‘lessons’ are untimely considerations for economic theories.

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.

The territory of modern and contemporary art today is dominated by institutions that engage in the symbolic transfer of a new ‘aura’ of art to luxury products and vice-versa. The result is the colossal circulation of money around the works and artists involved in speculation on inflated products.

Money is at the same time the clearest thing and the most difficult to understand. This paradox is set out by Anselm Jappe, the author, among other works, of La société autophage (2017), which shows us where this problem comes from. As a commodity, money has become the supreme commodity, the only commodity, the ultimate fetish, and the cause of a completely irrational order, capable of producing unprecedented catastrophes, like that of 2008.

This article by Margarida Abreu, economics lecturer at ISEG, Lisbon, focuses on theories of money and the monetary and financial system, in its complexity and the way that it involves a subjective dimension – trust. Among other things, we learn about how cryptocurrencies work and how we are moving towards a society in which hard cash is becoming obsolete.

The author of Doutor Fausto and Ensaio Sobre o Termo da História, among other books and essays, looks at Living Currency by Pierre Klossowski. It is a heterodox essay on the conversion of all libidinal force into a commodity and the resulting social organisation. Klossowski establishes a degree of equivalence between the libidinal economy and the economy of material goods and sheds light on the extreme logic of money and its life, which captures all lives.

The Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato has written a lot about the way in which capitalism in our time consists of producing ‘the indebted man’. Here he elaborates on the theory that the economy became entirely political for the first time after debt-currency appeared. It was created by the banks out of nothing, after Richard Nixon announced in 1971 that the US dollar would be leaving the gold standard.

This manuscript is by the French poet and essayist Christophe Hanna. He has written a book entitled Argent (Éditions Amsterdam, 2018), whose characters are identified by their first names plus their monthly salary. It was penned on the basis of topics sent to him by the editor of Electra, which he has reduced to subtitles. The poet, who makes no distinction between poetry and theory, has made money an inherent part of his actual writing.

Rio de Janeiro, the wonderful city, as it is called, has been revisited in its past and present by the pianist Gilda Oswaldo Cruz, who was born there and lived there for many years. The stunning natural surroundings between the sea and the hills, the violent social contrasts, and life in the favelas (slums) have all contributed to the effervescence of the city’s popular culture, of which samba and the Carnival are the most outstanding manifestations.

Briton A. J. P. Taylor was one of the most influential and controversial historians of his time, with a fundamentally important oeuvre on the political and diplomatic history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a pioneer in the use of mass media to disseminate history to a wide audience. Kathleen Burk is a lecturer and researcher at the University of London and author of the biography Troublemaker: The Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor. She has penned a portrait of this intellectual figure, who left no-one indifferent, for this number of Electra. His work still sparks passions and controversy, often on a par with those caused by the events and personalities that he studied.