I see the question of a critical edition of Céline’s anti-Jewish pamphlets quite differently from Pierre-André Taguieff. He would like, if possible, to be the editor of such a publication, being the most qualified for the task, together with Annick Duraffour, with whom he co-authored Céline, la Race, le Juif. I have the utmost respect for this monumental work and read it almost in one go as soon as it was published. The two authors gave a thorough explanation of Céline’s antisemitism, explored all its sources, dismantled all his subterfuges and lack of moral principles.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas liked to relate the views of his grandfather, a Lithuanian Jew, on the Dreyfus Affair: “A country that tears itself apart, that splits down the middle to save the honour of a little Jewish officer, that’s a country one should lose no time in going to.”¹

At the long border that separates the real from the fantastical, at that long border inscribed in the soil by the feet of those who daily patrol it, there is a diffuse zone, a zone lacking in discernment, a particularly hybrid zone, that goes by the name of Imagination.

The Picoas Tower, designed by architects Patrícia Barbas and Diogo Seixas Lopes, demands the resumption of an insistent debate on the history of skyscrapers, their problematic relationship with the city, and what they represent in urban policies.

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 exhibition Álvaro Lapa – O tempo todo [Álvaro Lapa – The whole time], curated by Miguel von Hafe Pérez at the Serralves Foundation, brings together over 300 works of art (from 1963 to 2005) to create the broadest retrospective of the artist held to date. With the inclusion of countless unseen pieces, its achievement is to give visibility to his extremely rich and complex painting, which sustains close links to literature, philosophy and politics.

The work of Álvaro Lapa (Évora, 1939 – Porto, 2006) developed, within the context of the Portugal of the 1960s, at the margins of the dominant cultural references, declining an alternative culture (one deriving from the whole historical inheritance – from the Romantic to the Surrealist movements — and the concrete work of the Beat Generation).

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.

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.