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.

‘Because there is a hidden story on every corner in Paris’. Thus ends this evocation of a city which, like no other, is built on space-time. In his article, the musician and writer Adolfo Luxúria Canibal mixes his own memories with more general ones. While his impressions do not ignore those of others, his personal experience of living in the city for five years lends them an authenticity. The vocalist of the band Mão Morta reminisces about this ‘cosmopolitan and parochial’ city, where living is an art form and reality is never disentangled from the imaginary, and the figure of Isidore Ducasse, the Count of Lautréamot, lurks like a luminescent shadow.

The French historian Patrick Rambourg, author of Histoire de la cuisine et de la gastronomie françaises (2010), describes the creation of the restaurant in the 18th century and its evolution. This Parisian institution, which has been exported all around the world, is suffused with the gastronomic mystique of Paris and constitutes a place of refined social interaction and conviviality.

In the year when we celebrate the centenary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth, Carla Benedetti, Bruno Moroncini and Vinícius Nicastro Honesko – authors of essays and studies on the filmmaker, writer, essayist and intellectual – evoke this leading figure of 20th century Italy, highlighting his relevance today.

Pasolini had a difficult theoretical and political intellectual relationship with the students that were involved in riots and uprisings in 1968. Here, Vinícius Nicastro Honesko, a lecturer at Universidade Federal do Paraná and author of Pier Paolo Pasolini: Estudos Sobre a Figura do Intelectual, writes about the effects on Pasolini’s thinking of the idea behind his redefinition of a student. This idea was that young people were now denied the opportunity of a ‘revolutionary experience’.

The philosopher and cultural historian Thomas Macho – a professor at Humboldt University of Berlin and director of a research centre on cultural sciences at the University of Linz in Austria – examines an issue that runs through Pasolini’s cinematic oeuvre: the relationship between the criticism of power and the metabolic logic of consumer society, with its representations of food and hunger.