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.

Autumn is said to make us think about those late, muted colours that some artists used in their works as if they belonged to them: Arcimboldo, Brueghel, Poussin, Boucher, Goya, Friedrich, Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Klimt, Schiele, Mucha, Klee, Hockney. Contemplating, digressing, recalling, dreaming, meditating, brooding and thinking are verbs that are part of this wisdom that does not know the flip side of the coin of life, the side that flips entirely towards us.

In the eyes of a poet born and living in Barcelona, this city has always attracted visitors and travellers, but has never easily lent itself to a complete knowledge and understanding. Today, swamped by tourists who think they see everything, it remains a mystery.

Céline’s anti-Semitic pamphlets — written between 1937-1941 and forbidden since the end of World War Two — aroused once again a violent polemic at the end of last year, when Gallimard announced it was going to republish them in a critical edition and, soon after, following some of the public reactions, gave up 100 diagonals on the project. On this controversial issue, we publish here the differing views of two authoritative voices on the matter: Pierre-André Taguieff, author of a remarkable essay on Céline’s anti-Semitism, and Serge Klarsfeld, one of the great activists in France for the rights of deported Jews.

When can an opinion be a crime? What are the limits to the freedom of expression? At what point does my freedom end because someone else’s begins? These questions have been raised in our times with an urgency that stems from the need to square the freedom of thought and of expression in public (nowadays on the social media as well) with the prevention of threats of whose danger and seriousness history makes us aware. On these clearly topical questions, the Spanish writer and journalist Francisco Alba and the Portuguese lawyer and criminologist Rui Patrício pen their ideas.

In the times we are living in, new digital technologies provide us with a true flood of information. But we remain highly ignorant of how this information is produced, selected, and ranked, i.e. there is an information deficit on information itself, which leads to its acritical acceptance and a backward step in thinking and reflection.

Drawing on the theoretical, literary and musical contributions of the Cape Verdean musician Mário Lúcio, who takes creoleness as a cultural and political ideal, Marta Lança, programmer and editor of the website Buala, evokes a few key theorists of creolisation and miscegenation, showing what is at stake in this phenomenon that transcends the Cape Verdean context.

The question of animal rights rests on a notion of politics that pushes it beyond its traditional limits. To think of and defend ‘animal politics’, which in its broadest sense amounts to ecopolitics, is the task to which the Bulgarian philosopher Boyan Manchev commits himself in this article, continuing his earlier work on ‘wild freedom’.

The portfolio we present here was prepared for Electra by one of the most renowned and most innovative artists of our time. He is also one of the most sophisticatedly learned and most effectively communicative.

In this work, William Kentridge couples semiology with iconology and finds the sacred meaning and profane use of words. By placing these two modes face to face, he creates through their coming together an indetermina-cy and interrogation. These works are like visi-ble sparks emitted by the incessant breath of an invisible fire. They are thus both familiar and strange to us at the same time.

On 7 December 1970, fifty years ago this year, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Willy Brandt, visited the Warsaw Ghetto during an official visit to Poland. There, he lay a wreath of flowers in memory of the Jews murdered during the Second World War and, unpredictably, kneeled before the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. Tragically stark, this picture, which associates political action with historical memory, became an iconic and ground-breaking image in photographic history, with a universal moral and political resonance. In 1971, Willy Brandt received the Nobel Peace Prize. In this Register section, the art historian Nicola Hille interprets the impact of this extraordinary precedent with great originality, questioning the relevance and validity in the present day of an act which at the time divided German public opinion.