Autumn is said to make us think about those late, muted colours that some artists used in their works as if they belonged to them: Arcimboldo, Brueghel, Poussin, Boucher, Goya, Friedrich, Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Klimt, Schiele, Mucha, Klee, Hockney. Contemplating, digressing, recalling, dreaming, meditating, brooding and thinking are verbs that are part of this wisdom that does not know the flip side of the coin of life, the side that flips entirely towards us.

There is a history of kissing in public places in the city that can be documented by iconography. It is this history and the different attitudes and reactions to the urban kiss, depending on geography and cultures, that the Catalan poet and essayist José Ángel Cilleruelo pursues in the article, which is also an evocation of the ethics and aesthetics of flânerie.

If “at first sight” a commodity appears to be an obvious thing, analysis could be said to be a second way of looking at it, which frees it from the fallacy of an obvious, or self-evident (selbstverständlich) simplicity: that is to say it destroys that “selbst”, the pretext of autonomy, and reveals that it can be traced back to an accumulation of metaphysical and theological complications. 

Handbags, pencils, frozen food. As well as cars, shoes, chocolate and petrol. The universe of things that surrounds us seems not only to take the most disparate forms, but also has the most varied uses. One of the merits of Marx was that he showed us what unites these objects, despite their differences: the objects that surround us are, for the most part, artefacts, the embodiment of human labour, produced for the purpose of distribution, sale and consumption. They are, in fact, commodities. For Marx, unlike other proponents of classical economics, the fact of being the fruit of human labour does not determine a commodity’s capacity to embody an idea, a project, a vision. Objects are the material and visible incarnation of labour, and it is this that imbues them with something more: the ability to symbolise the social and economic divisions that made their creation possible.

Maria Velho da Costa is a highly respected writer who has nonetheless remained in the background, impermeable to the processes and strategies used in the public construction of writers. Her works of narrative fiction are a milestone in the history of Portuguese literature of the last half-century. She combines a dash of experimentalism with the great points of reference of modern literature. Maria Velho da Costa's immense merit stands out in our literary landscape.

Tourism is the greatest social, anthropological and economic phenomenon of our times. Its impact on the lives of cities, changes in landscapes, and countries' and regions' cultures is so great that nothing remains intact wherever it goes. Regarded by some as a source of devastation that particularly affects historical city areas (but whose waves spread far beyond urban limits) and regarded by others as the achievement of the most positive interests and the highest ideals, tourism today is a subject of debate, controversy and urban conflict. By choosing it as the central theme of this number of Electra, we wish to treat it as a complex phenomenon that invites a wide variety of analyses by different disciplines and raises varying ideological viewpoints.

In the year of the bicentenary of Karl Marx's birth, the historian José Neves addresses the complex legacy that the philosopher left us, a legacy that did not pass the test of time or the ups-and-downs of political and economic history. He talks of what is still current – and often such an integral part of current language and representations of the political and social world that we all seem to be more or less Marxians, even if we are not Marxists.

Rosi Braidotti is a philosopher and feminist. Along her philosophical path, this Italian-Australian woman passed through some of the fundamental stages of contemporary feminism, from Simone de Beauvoir, but then went down her own road. It is a road that is somewhat distant from known accounts of the theory of gender (such as those by Judith Butler) and the criticism of identity fixations. Her voice therefore sounds rather unconventional, as we can see in this interview.

In this diary, Pedro Cabrita Reis describes his senses to the world. They're all there, all five of them, shrewd, active and as alert as antennae to the news of nature and the scintillations of culture.

This sculptor, painter, sketcher, bon vivant (in its most literal sense) and citizen of the world believes that art is life without quotes and life is art without delay. He feels that the world is the largest studio and the studio is the closest world.

The pages in this diary are in facsimile form because the handwriting and sketches intertwine, entangle, interlock, possess each other and belong to each other, and only in this single, unique form do they belong to us. Here we find what, in Cabrita Reis, is the most vivid, a vitality that makes everything his.

This 'Book of Hours' is based on a private agenda and takes the form of music notation. It speaks to us of a certain poetically inhabiting the world, without which we don't inhabit it.

Bernardo Carvalho, a writer from Rio de Janeiro, ventures into the city of São Paulo and studies its less obvious side. Sometimes, he examines it through the strong lenses of a Lévi-Strauss; at others he sketches a psychological portrait of it on the basis of certain symptoms.

These two indirectly conflicting articles speak different languages. They are an eloquent example of a disagreement (i.e. two languages that do not have a common measure) raised by the issue of 'race'. The first is by Vasco M. Barreto, a biologist and researcher at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. The second is by Pedro Schacht Pereira who has a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian studies from Brown University in the United States and often writes about racism in the Portuguese press. Anthony Appiah, an important figure in cultural studies, once said, 'It is time for the biological concept of race to disappear without a trace.' But, as Barreto's article shows, the concept has not disappeared and its traces are still appearing in scientific debates. This debate is far from the 'scientific' racism prior to the Second World War, but still raises controversies, reservations and hesitations. On the contrary, from the point of view of post-colonial studies, it is just a discursive category. And it is precisely on the assumption of race as a discursive construction within a culture and a language that Pedro Schacht Pereira bases the issue of racism in a work by Eça de Queirós.

Rui Chafes, a sculptor, writes especially beautifully about the work of Manuel Rosa, another sculptor, on the subject of an anthological exhibition entitled Clareira, which marked the artist's return to public shows. Chafes says that his work is not of this fast, hurried world made of meteoric successions of superficial images and information that make us confound beauty with fleeting attraction, a pulse with a death rattle.

David Lynch himself classified the third Twin Peaks series as an 18-hour film. In the current circumstances of the film industry this classification has a substantial reach on the level of theory and programmes.

Furious, unexpected, satirical: Karl Kraus's aphorisms are an exemplary manifestation of early 20th century Viennese culture.

Contemporary design culture and criticism in a book of essays with a title that serves as a programme.

‘If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,’ Bernard Baruch once said. ‘If all you have is a phone with an internet connection, everything looks like a web,’ we could say in an echo, in a chorus (or through loudspeakers). From the small light of a multicoloured screen, the world is becoming increasingly similar, not like a supermarket shelf from which we select objects for purchasing, but like a rhizome of data and relationships that we can access, almost instantly, with a click.