Bologna, the city of porticos, towers, and the oldest university in Europe, the city where Pasolini was born, is read, in its metamorphoses, as a palimpsest by a philosopher who lives there. Under the surge of tourism, the city resists and survives, emerging as all that is contained in the word ‘tradition’.

An essential task of our historical consciousness is to think about the time we live in, and to present it as a complex unity for which we have no name. The evident manifestations of the age and its less visible but distinctive traits are the topics of five texts that make up the special feature of this inaugural issue.

The traditional categories of modern politics are now inadequate. The foundations of the very notion of democracy are undermined, while the words inherited from modernity, which had once served political action and political ideas, are now devoid of sense.

The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and the philosopher Déborah Danowski talked with Andrea Cavalletti about the book they co-authored, Há Mundo por Vir? Ensaio Sobre os Medos e os Fins [The Ends of the World]. An incursion into the imagery of the End, at a time when the fear of an ecological catastrophe has spread out.

This text conjures up a voyage, a ‘theory-fiction’ that leads the reader to the Anthropocene, the new geological age. The fiction begins with a well-known character, recognizable by his yellow head of hair and his tweets, and ends with a fantasy where a reinvented Marx is the author of a critique of political astronomy.

Gender issues have indeed revolutionised the conventional way of thinking about sexual difference. However, it is now clear that we must challenge its limitations, point out its failed possibilities, and critique its representations and conventions.

Each epoch has its needs, its problems, its desires, obsessions, and a vocabulary where all this polarizes.However, a difference marks these times of ours: never before have there been such powerful means of communicating and amplifying fetish words with ideological value.

A brief sentence written by Jules Michelet in 1929, both enigmatic and evident, has lent itself to many glosses and interpretations: Chaque époque rêve la suivante. It is a thought-provoking phrase, to which one delights in responding — with Walter Benjamin in sight.

Two conflicting views on Universal Basic Income inaugurate a section committed to embrace opposition and ideological debates. In recent years, the idea of allocating a general basic income to all citizens has been the subject of an intense and widespread public discussion; positions for and against the UBI have traversed the Right and the Left taunting their  established boundaries.

Two conflicting views on Universal Basic Income inaugurate a section committed to embrace opposition and ideological debates.In recent years, the idea of allocating a general basic income to all citizens has been the subject of an intense and widespread public discussion; positions for and against the UBI have traversed the Right and the Left taunting their  established boundaries.