The sun blinds me. I can't see anything. I am a living being with only one life, and so until I die, I want to be born.

The lines separating truth from lies are subject to breaks imposed by certain factors, which the writer, psychiatrist and ethologist António Bracinha Vieira describes and analyses, beginning with the example of the social intelligence of primates, which we have inherited through our natural phylogenetic history.

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’.

Yves Klein's exhibition on emptiness was presented sixty-five years ago, in 1958, at Galerie Iris Clert, in Paris, and is considered a fundamental moment in the history of art. This essay by Steffen Dix takes it as the starting point for a personal journey into questioning the place of the void in art and philosophy. Along with Klein's name are those of Giorgio de Chirico, with his metaphysical painting, Friedrich Nietzsche, with his philosophy of affirming life as a work of art, and Fernando Pessoa, with his heteronyms and his city. Steffen Dix is a German researcher and university professor. A specialist in religious history and modernism in Europe, he is also a translator and the author of renowned studies on Fernando Pessoa.

People need to know that any liberation struggle is a combination of victories and suffering, and sometimes those two things are in the same person or the same family or the same group.

Among the most original works of queer theory is this Countersexual Manifesto, which appeared twenty years ago, signed by Beatriz Preciado, and now has Paul B. Preciado as its author. Preciado is a Spanish transgender philosopher, an exceptional figure, where queer theory and practice combine in a single movement.

A free, democratic and developed society should, in principle, allow public declarations of all kinds. There is no censorship – or there should not be any – and every citizen is therefore free to voice, and is responsible for voicing, their opinions on social and political matters. However, if these opinions are offensive or incite hatred, violence or discrimination against a specific social group for their race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc., are the people expressing them criminally liable? The Criminal Code in my country states that they are. We are governed by the rule of law, so I will not dispute this fact. Such opinions are a crime and that is a simple fact. I will focus instead on what is wrong with these opinions.

Stupidity makes us reactive, igniting indignation, a redeeming idiophobia and denunciation. But, evidently, it is almost always the stupidity of others that is at stake, since our own, practised in the first person, is nothing but a more or less provisional episode, though overcome, a weakness that has happened in the past and that we can only feel sorry about now: “I was really stupid!”

The Italian philosopher wrote a book about Hölderlin, focusing on the second part of his life, the phase of madness, from 1807 to 1843, the year of the poet's death. For these thirty-seven years the poet lived in a house on the River Neckar, in Tübingen, under the care of the carpenter Ernst Zimmer and his wife. What does it mean to inhabit, what does ‘habitual’ or ‘inhabiting’ life mean? This is the central question of Agamben's book, read here by Bernardo Vaz de Castro.

For Álvaro Siza, drawing is his pact with the world and with himself. This highly renowned architect, who received the Pritzker Prize in 1992 for his work in so many countries around the world, never ceases to draw what he sees and what he imagines: buildings, objects, bodies, faces, figures (frequently his own), animals, landscapes, visions, dreams and sentiments. His drawings see and open eyes. They listen and they scrutinise. They play and they have fun. They mention and they measure. They think and they meditate.