The Italian philosopher Remo Bodei is currently a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of a vast oeuvre, which includes a book entitled Generazioni (2014). In it, he points out that our history has been marked by a generational fracture. He insists that, as a result, we must accept responsibility with regard to the younger generation, on various levels, at a time fraught with uncertainties about the future.

On the basis of two films, the teacher, who is also (or especially) a poet and renowned translator, reflects on his experience of dealing with school-age youngsters. He takes the stage in a clear-sighted relationship with the ‘restless’ characters of students going through the different stages of a sinuous ‘mental path’.
 

This testimony of a young high-school teacher on the outskirts of Paris speaks of a highly optimistic relationship with students that have been labelled problematic. Going against the most persistent stereotypes, she reveals how, unexpectedly, the students believe in the Republican values on which French schools are founded.
 

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 writer recounts the experience of youth in a place that, in his view, is ‘Lisbon’s last suburb’. It is told in the first person and filtered through eyes that have meanwhile acquired the language and analytical tools needed to understand the hatred and cruel laws of a world – ours – full of borders and demarcated territories. It is of paradigmatic value here.
 

The modern obsession with the stages of life has not only produced ‘youth’, with its representations and its myths, but also old age. This article deals with a movie of life, very much to the taste of totalitarianisms, writes José Bragança de Miranda, with a critical eye trained to decipher the hieroglyphs of the present and its manifestations.

Five young people from different backgrounds with different experiences in work and as students talk about themselves and the world on the basis of their own observations. They describe atmospheres and environments and show us some of the affective shades of our age. They also ask to be heard freely and attentively.

Manuel Gusmão performs an untimely exercise in this book. He includes in his poetry a strong political, interventional and militant dimension that echoes the heroic chant of some of Brecht’s poems. But just to complicate things, A Foz em Delta justifies its title by also flowing in a completely different direction, marked by elegiac characteristics.
 

This book, which she signs with a lower-case pseudonym, is the manifesto of a woman who was born in the United States in 1952. This woman, bell hooks, is also black. It is important to say ‘also’ because the whole issue of the book, as Marta Lança demonstrates, is the conjunction of a gender identity and a ‘racial’ identity.
 

A memory: in the 1980s, at the annual conference of American art historians, which in that particular year saw thousands of scholars gathering in the heart of Texas, a young ‘deconstructor’ after the Derrida model began his presentation without slides (used and abused by all the other speakers) and with the words, ‘No pictures, just concepts!’ The stunned audience shifted nervously in their seats.