This international workshop begins from a shared diagnosis: the widespread perception of living in a time permeated by somber atmospheres, marked by a progressive dimming of the world’s symbolic luminosity and by an increasing sense of fragility in individual and collective conditions of life. Wars re-emerging within the horizon of European experience, environmental crises that testify to an exhausted planet, and a general shift from the force of language to the logic of force all contribute to generating a form of anticipatory anguish, oriented toward threats still distant yet perceived as drawing nearer in time and space. In such a context, the question is not only what may still be hoped for, but above all what it means to hope: what semiotic, ethical, and religious function hope can assume when the future appears opaque and uncertain.

The symposium proposes an interdisciplinary reflection weaving together semiotics, philosophy, theology, and cultural studies in order to interrogate hope as both an interpretative practice and a symbolic form. Modern and contemporary literature offers paradigmatic figures of this tension: from the inner and social transformations narrated in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, where hope confronts disillusionment and maturation, to the political and collective horizon evoked by André Malraux in L’Espoir, in which hope emerges as a shared construction of meaning under extreme historical conditions. In parallel, philosophical and religious traditions reveal the conceptual complexity of hope: Seneca, in the Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, invites us to recognize the entanglement of fear and hope as a fundamental dynamic of the human soul; Augustine conceives spes as a dynamic tension orienting the community toward eschatological fulfilment; Leopardi, in the Zibaldone, identifies hope as a force inherent and inseparable from life itself, capable of persisting even within a radically disenchanted horizon.

Alongside these classical genealogies, the workshop will engage contemporary reflections that redefine the role of hope in contexts of global crisis. Ernst Bloch, in Das Prinzip Hoffnung, interprets hope as a utopian anticipation inscribed in cultural practices and collective desires; Charles Péguy, through the figure of the petite fille espérance, underscores its apparent fragility and, at the same time, its generative strength; Rebecca Solnit, in Hope in the Dark, conceives hope not as optimistic prediction but as a radical openness to the unforeseeable. In dialogue with these perspectives, Primo Levi’s testimony in Se questo è un uomo reminds us that hope may survive even under the most extreme conditions, not as abstract consolation but as a minimal practice of dignity and resistance.

Deliberately international and interdisciplinary, the workshop takes place in Trento as a symbolic space of dialogue among diverse religious and ethical traditions, refusing an exclusively European perspective and opening itself to voices from other continents. If “hope is the last to die,” the central question becomes how it might guide the interpretation of the present without collapsing into rhetoric or illusion. The day thus seeks to explore hope as a semiotic device capable of articulating new languages for the future, transforming contemporary anguish into a field of critical elaboration and shared responsibility.

PROGRAM

8:30 | The Semiotics of Somber Atmospheres
Massimo LEONE, ISR-FBK, Italy
Juan ALONSO ALDAMA, University og Paris Cité-PHILéPOL, Framce
Federico MONTANARI, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

9:00 | Gramsci Fractured. A Metatheory of Hope
Frédéric VANDENBERGHE, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

9:30 | The last to Die: The Narrative Complexity of Hope in India’s Epic text Mahābhārata
Seema KHANWALKAR, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India

10:00 | Semiosis of Hope: Towards a Passion for the Possible
Yunhee LEE, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Republic of Korea

10:30 | Discussion

11:00 | Break

11:30 | Esperançar (to Hope): The Semiotics of a Possible Future in Brazil and Latin America: Freedom, Imagination and Cognitive Justice
Clotilde PEREZ, University of São Paulo, Brazil

12:00 | The Subject of Hope: European and Extra-European orientations
Michael FACIUS, The University of Tokyo, Japan

12:30 | Stuck in Dysphoria. “War Atmospheres”: From Art Activism to the Possibility of Building Hope
Cristina DEMARIA, University of Bologna, Italy
Federico MONTANARI, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

13:00 | Discussion

13:30 | Break

15:00 | Poster Session
Antonino DI COSMO, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
Silvia GIUBILATO, University of Padua, Italy
Manuela MORETTI, University of Trento, Italy – University of Svizzera Italiana, Switzerland
Francesca PADOVANO, University of Palermo, Italy – University of Paris
Cité, France

15:30 | Roundtable with the Center for Religious Studies, FBK
Georgiana Diana APOSTICA, Daria ARKHIPOVA, Luca BRUNET, Lorenzo CORTESI, Valeria FABRETTI, Lucia GALVAGNI, Accursio GRAFFEO, Alessandro LONGO, Desy MACIS, Silvia OMENETTO, Boris RAEHME, Tommaso ROPELATO, Rebecca SABATINI, Debora TONELLI, Stefania YAPO

17:30 | Hopeful Final Remarks
Paolo COSTA, ISR-FBK, Italy

Scientific Conveners
Juan ALONSO ALDAMA (University of Paris Cité)
Massimo LEONE (ISR-FBK – University of Turin)
Federico MONTANARI (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)

Co-organizing Institutions
University of Paris Cité
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Co-funding Institution
MIC – Italian Ministry of Culture

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