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The metaphysical theology proposed by Paul Tillich offers the perspective of a constant connection between the human existential journey and the problem of Non-Being. Centered on the idea of Being, both metaphysics and theology seem to place the issue of Nothingness, of Emptiness, in the background. In reality, the dialectic between Being and Non-Being constitutes the central dynamic for the entire evolution of existence and, likewise, of human thought. Confrontation with Non-Being becomes one of the most important sources of reflection and fundamental ontic experiences. From Non-Being arises anxiety, manifesting in multiple forms that appear equally devastating to our consciousness. A natural question would be: how did those in the past overcome anxiety, and how can we do so today? Paul Tillich believes we are mistaken. Anxiety cannot truly be overcome; instead, it can and must be assimilated—otherwise, convulsive despair could overwhelm the consciousness.

Social moral obligation, its automatism and false faces, declarative and regulatory laws, the individual and social ego, collective solidarity and the pulsation of creative emotion, intelligent and instinctual society, open and closed social dynamics, Divinity as a transcendent religious reference point and Reason as the limit of moral-philosophical endeavors - all these concepts and themes are just a few of the major subjects that crystallize Bergsonian vitalism's conception, a conception that cannot be identified with religious forms of metaphysical approach but clearly approaches the scenario of thought and experience proposed by these forms. This text attempts to capture such a similarity and dialectical interplay between the concepts evoked above.

In the context of capitalist globalisation and time-space compression (as defined by David Harvey), several socio-spatial theorists have analysed the relationship between the local and the global, as well as how certain regional representations are the product of cultural interferences and hybridisations. From this point of view, our special issue, Uneven Worlds. Beyond the Canons of Cultural Representations, investigates the role played by regional and (semi-)peripheral cultures within world-systems and geographies of uneven development, and explores how they resist the false homogenisation implied by globalisation. Whether or not we are drawn to global fictions that have emerged from postcolonial literary studies and have employed tropes such as “hybridity, diaspora, transculturation, subaltern, hegemony, deterritorialisation, rhizome, mestizo, Eurocentrism and othering” (O’Brien and Szeman 2001, 605), in relation to world literature or to the “one, and unequal” world-literary system (Moretti 2004, WReC), a certain reminiscence of the Iron Curtain, an impossible translation, and a lack of porosity characterise the circulation of peripheral literatures towards the centre. While writers such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Shehan Karunatilaka and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr are recuperated in the central circuit of the Nobel, Booker and Goncourt prizes, but still living and producing in the centre, we chose to explore the mechanisms of resistance, the impossibility of translation and the subversive strategies of “cultural management” that export various models of the periphery.

This article illustrates the activity of the architect and painter Albert Krausz (1892-1958), who designed in Timișoara dozens of villas and blockhouses in the modernist style in the 1930s, being the author of an important number of portraits and landscapes preserved nowadays in museums and private collections in Romania, Germany, and Israel, or only mentioned or reproduced in newspapers and magazines during the interwar period. Two museums in Timișoara preserve the memory of this highly sought-after portraitist between the two World Wars for the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals of the city on the Bega river: writers, painters, journalists, photographers, politicians, industrialists, merchants and lawyers, thus creating an illustrated lexicon of the representatives of the various cultural-linguistic communities, who contributed to the creation of the multicultural spirit of the city of Timișoara/Temesvár (Hungarian)/Temeschburg (German)/Temišvar (Serbian). Various memorial sources testimony the presence of Albert Krausz in the cultural and artistic circles of the interwar Timișoara, whitin the houses of dr. Moritz and Bianka Schönberger, Else Kornis, Ervin and Raimunda Beatrix Salló, and Olga Szuits.

This article illustrates the exhibitions and the strategy to enrich the cultural heritage of the National Museum of Banat through acquisitions and gifts during the years 2019–2020, when a large number of objects were registered in the inventories of the Visual Arts Department, of extremely diverse typologies: paintings, sculptures, graphic works, ceramic, glass and metal objects, furniture, textiles and clothing accessories from different periods: portraits from the galleries of the noble families Patyánszky de Viszák, Pálik-Ucsevny de Furluk, and Vukovics de Beregsău, five paintings and one sculpture from the famous Virgil Birou collection, engineer, writer and photographer from interwar Timișoara, the testamentary donation of Marieta Pamfil with 11 art works (6 paintings, 2 graphic works, 3 sculptures) by Ştefan Szőnyi și Andrei Orgonaș, which illustrate the world of Olga Szuits (1911–1992), the mother of Marieta Pamfil and the muse of the painter Ştefan Szőnyi in the interwar period.

This paper proposes an exploration of various points of intersection between poetry, thought and contemporary photography by means of a ‘parallactic’ analysis of the volume El truco preferido de Satán, a compilation by Spanish poet Jenaro Talens that features a selection of fragments from Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus, The Arcades Project, which have been paired up with photographs by Alberto García-Alix, arguably the most renowned artistic chronicler of the Movida Madrileña in the 1980s. The resulting relationship of intermediality and supplementarity is a complex one, with moments of proximity, but also of extraneation. In order to capture these nuances and to elevate the obtained insights to a more general level, the notion of parallax, particularly in one of Slavoj Žižek’s specific formulations, serves as this essay’s methodological framework, as it sets out to understand García-Alix’s photographs as the elusive, spectral, parallactic supplement that discovers what would otherwise remain hidden in Benjamin’s fragments.

Sustainability requires fundamental adjustments not only in terms of policy objectives, but also in the ways policies are made and implemented, i.e. governance. Based on a transdisciplinary research project, this article presents how sustainability governance is understood and practiced in six Swiss cantons, and describes the challenges faced by cantonal sustainability offices. The central finding is that the cantons have developed different forms of sustainability governance, but face similar challenges. This leads to several follow-up questions about the potentials and limitations of different forms of sustainability governance in dealing with these challenges.

This paper explores, using an Agent-based model approach (ABM), the conditions for the emergence and the structuration of quality wine’s historical areas as described in the work of Roger Dion, particularly in his article entitled “Querelles des anciens et des modernes sur les facteurs de la qualité du vin” written in 1952 (Dion, 1952).

This multidisciplinary study of Swiss Emmental cheese relates values determined by chemical, biochemical, rheological, and bacteriological analyses to those obtained by sensoric analysis of taste as well as tactile and visual properties. To this effect, 50 four-months-old Emmental loaves of different qualities were chosen at their taxation and submitted to 165 analyses; six of these analyses were sensoric evaluations. The instrumental analyses included quantitative determination of water, fat, salt, volatile fatty acids, lactic acid (L and D), nitrogen fractions (TN, WSN, NPN), ammonia, free amino acids, biogenic amines, one peptide, and volatile components. The latter were analyzed with two different methods. Moreover, two microbiological analyses were carried out (non-lactic-acid bacteria and streptococci of group D), four rheological measurements (penetration depth, stress at 33% deformation, compression rate and stress at peak stress point) and determination of three colour components according to Hunter. The sensoric taste analysis permitted us to evaluate the flavour development, the typical character and the quality of the cheese. The tactile analysis enabled us to characterize the texture, structure, and consistency and the visual evaluation to examine the eyes of the cheese body. The first part of this paper divided into 3 parts deals with univariate analysis of distribution profiles of some characteristic measurable variables for Swiss Emmental cheese.