‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’

The brief history of the concept of sustainable development is well known. It gained its ‘right to the city’ with the definition quoted above. It was used in the famous 1987 Brundtland Report for the United Nations about the environment and development. Sustainable development made a timid appearance in the 1980 World Conservation Strategy prepared by the IUCN, the largest and most respected biodiversity and nature conservation organisation in the world. Its roots go back much further, however, demonstrating the so-far irreconcilable tension between its two concepts: the dynamic of growth and intensification associated with ‘development’ stands in contrast to the idea of balance and durability associated with the adjective ‘sustainable’.

With the new media and social networks, the media landscape today has changed out of all recognition: the ground rules of the public domain have shifted completely, the old hierarchies have been overthrown, power has fragmented, whilst reality and unreality, not to say truth and untruth, are now interchangeable. Early hopes for a more transparent society have vanished and, instead, the world has become opaque. As things now stand, the press can no longer claim to be the Fourth Estate and what little power that still clings to it is fragile. The articles in this section set out to explore and understand where these and other issues may be taking us.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has moved into a phase marked by the law that defines Israel as the “nation state of the Jewish people”, adopting Hebrew as its only official language. Donatella Di Cesare, an Italian philosopher, and Éric Marty, a leading French voice in literary studies, have both written and taken a public stance on Israel, Judaism and the Jewish question. Here they comment on the law, taking different paths as to its meaning, reach and consequences.

At the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris, curated by Helena de Freitas, a new exhibition places the work of Rui Chafes and Alberto Giacometti side by side and head to head. The magnetic force of attraction between the two bodies of work is clear to the viewer, in what brings them together and what keeps them apart. Nicolao Federico, writer, philosopher and curator, is familiar with the work of both Giacometti and Chafes and writes about the artists and the exhibition in which they come together.

On the other hand, after visiting Rui Chafe's exhibition in Paris, the poet, Manuel de Freitas, wrote the artist a letter. The starting point for the letter is a quotation from Alberto Giacometti that speaks of the imperfection, the virulence and the violence of poetry, painting, and sculpture. The poet talks to us about the darkness, the silence, the abyss and the night that are so palpable in this exhibition. And, as always happens with Manuel de Freitas, he talks to us about death.

Young ideals were one of the driving forces behind the social, cultural and political history of the 20th century. These days, there is no longer a place for the ideals that were once a young people’s prerogative. What has triumphed today is youth as an ideal and aspiration, i.e. young style and its culture. This desire, which has ceased to belong to an age-group, and the difficulties of access to full adulthood have rendered the borders between generational categories more fluid and opened up an injustice between generations. Many of the privileges that adults enjoyed no longer exist for the younger generation. The very large share that the idea of youth holds in the social and aesthetic market does not correspond to young people’s actual situation. In some ways, they are a robbed generation and, on the other, only they are fit to keep up with the times, which have been accelerating at breakneck speed. This dossier covers these issues.

The focus on animals (and animality), as well as the idea that humans have duties towards them and that it is intolerable to treat them as ‘things’ and deny them the faculty of feeling and suffering, has become one of the great issues of our time. It is present not only in civic movements that are highly active in the public sphere, but also in the social and human sciences, where an important field dealing with animals has emerged. Ethics, politics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy: today these disciplines are mobilised in an extensive operation that rescues animals from the silence to which philosophical thought – but not literature or art – has condemned them. The articles presented here deal with this type of reflection, in an interdisciplinary approach.

Never before has there been such a lot of public discussion about animals, so much care and concern about how they are treated and what happens to them. Never before have animals, and not just pets, played such an important role in the human and social worlds. Today there is a very far-reaching, lively ‘animal question’ that is simultaneously galvanising philosophy, ethics, politics (or bio-politics), law and ecology. To such an extent that in this day and age there is an animal turn, like previous turns that have gained the right to a trademark in the humanities and social sciences, such as the linguistic turn.

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) and Dora Maar (1901–1997), two women and two artists. In their time, the fact that they were women severely hindered their careers as artists. For that reason, today it is impossible to look at their work without considering what restricted, governed and limited them. The retrospectives presented in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay and Centre Pompidou showcase this work, which was interwoven with the artists’ lives, where the potential and risk they represented had to be conquered. This is what the historian, researcher and curator Helena de Freitas tells us, with critical and perceptive intelligence. Her words are infused with the proud and courageous melancholy with which these artists affirmed themselves in a world that denied them.

The partial destruction of Notre-Dame by fire and Emmanuel Macron’s immediate response, promising that the cathedral would be rebuilt in record time, prompted a public discussion among experts on the forms of that reconstruction and the politics of heritage conservation (meaning also: the politicisation of heritage). This is the subject matter of the next three articles, written by Salvatore Settis, who signed an open letter to the French president demanding that the Heritage Code be respected; Carlo Pùlisci, an Italian art historian, who has published extensively on cathedrals, churches and the culture of restoration; and Pedro Levi Bismarck, an architect and researcher at the Porto University Faculty of Architecture. We are confronted with three different points of view, encompassing cultural memory and the heritage crisis (Settis), the history and culture of restoration (Pùlisci), and a political critique of conservationist logic and rhetoric (Bismarck).

These days, people everywhere are calling for a type of politics that places ethical requirements at its centre. It is time to question this stitching together of ethics and politics and the misunderstandings and consequences of this claim for the concept of politics. The response to this challenge comes, on the one hand, from Donatella Di Cesare, an Italian philosopher well-known for her books on Heidegger and the Jews (from the German philosopher’s Black Notebooks) and on the ‘philosophy of migration’, and, on the other, from Bruno Peixe Dias, a doctoral student in the area of political philosophy.