In this essay, the Swiss researcher and architect Isabella Pasqualini looks at urban areas in search of her own space, where technology finds the subjectivity it needs to generate new objectivities. This intellectual and sensorial, individual and gregarious, real and virtual experience is part of the genealogy of geographic utopias, cultural mythologies and imaginary architectures of people who have designed ideal cities. Seen in this mobile, mutable light, the urban space turns into a stage for successive and simultaneous performances, a place of continuous creation that creates those who create it. This is why the people that live it are truly those who live in it.

A verse by Goethe was quoted in passing by philosopher Hannah Arendt in an essay on Brecht, in which she is highly critical of the effects of the poet’s political and ideological commitment in some of his poems and plays. The verse is the subject of comment by José Maria Vieira Mendes, who is a playwright, a member of Teatro Praga, and a writer of essays and an extraordinary diary (Arroios. Diário de um Diário, Dois Dias, 2015) – and who could not ignore Arendt’s mediation.

This interview with a Portuguese scientist, an internationally renowned immunologist, takes the form of a wide-ranging conversation conducted by Vasco Barreto, a researcher at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. They talk about António Coutinho’s career and the roles he has played in public life, notably as director of the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, and also about theoretical questions relating to the philosophy of science and the scientific process. In addition, they discuss pragmatic issues concerning science policy.

The Lourdes Castro exhibition at Musée régional d’art contemporain Occitanie in France was curated by Anne Bonnin. It was a revelation and was ‘greeted with amazement and enthusiasm’. This is what João Pinharanda tells us in his comments and critique. Starting from the exhibition and its itinerary, this curator and art historian opens up new perspectives in the way we look at such original, subtle, absorbing and fleeting work. Made of light and shadow, it seems to be suspended in space and time. Or rather, suspended between space and time. It is this eternity of the moment that makes its contemporaneity a fascinating visual enigma and an engaging poetic mystery.

The long-awaited publication of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality adds a new issue to those already existing: the theological debates on sex in the first centuries of Christianity. Art historian and literary critic João Oliveira Duarte highlights the importance that Foucault lent to the idea of desire and the object of desire in Christian questions about sexuality.

(Definition 1: slow march)

How do you bring overused words back into the world? Among countless hypotheses, let us think of the punch of two other words: seduction and courage. The beguiling challenge – and to accept it, you must be naive and susceptible to seduction. Or the brave, clear-headed creature that chooses the obstacle, the enemy.

Let us make our position clear from the start, as summarised in the two epigraphs. The first, more problematic, written in a Europe on the brink of World War I, implies that body-mind-action should tend towards a human ideal of integrity (the ‘upright gait’ also mentioned by Ernst Bloch); the other (derived from a classic of theoretical thought, written at the end of that war) proposes that art is not above (or below) an ethical conscience and that beauty should not excuse barbarity or forms of thought that legitimise it.

Great books are not loved. Their authors even less so. Great writers are not loved. Their books even less so. The former are always tainted by the suspicion that they are too free. The latter are suspected of allowing themselves this freedom. In either case, this freedom will never be enough for books and their authors. Enough to exhaust the possibilities of freedom itself. This is what gives rise to fear (provoking ‘hostility’, according to Bernhard). In this, they would not like their readers to be more self-sufficient than they are, which is more frightening still.

In this interview, Vandana Shiva, one of the most well-known environmental activists of our time, speaks of her work in support of organic agriculture, both in her home country, India, and on a global level. The main topics addressed are the indispensable role of women in a caring, human and ecological economy, and the need for us to resist the distortion of the original meanings of words in the language of the market and colonization.

In this article, the French historian François Hartog, who established the basic concepts of ‘presentism’ and ‘regimes of historicity’, delineates the main stages of a history of acceleration. They range from the dawn of modernity to the ‘presentist’ moment in which we are living, a moment for which there exists only the time of a shortened present that determines the triumph of the ‘short term’.