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 | Introduction: Semiotics of Dark Atmospheres
Juan ALONSO ALDAMA, University of Paris-Cité, Federico MONTANARI, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

9:00 | Title
Frédéric VANDENBERGHE, Rio de Janeiro State University, Brazil

9:30 | Title
Seema KHANWALKAR, Ahmedabad University, India

10:00 | Title
Yunhee LEE, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Republic of Korea

10:30 | Discussion

11:00 | Break

11:30 | Title
Clotilde PEREZ, University of São Paulo, Brazil

12:00 | Title
Michael FACIUS, Tokyo Institute of Advanced Studies, Japan

12:30 | Title
Cristina DE MARIA, University of Bologna, Italy

13:00 | Discussion

13:30 | Break

15:30 | Roundtable with the Center for Religious Studies, FBK
Participants’ names

17:30 | Closing Remarks
Paolo COSTA, ISR/FBK

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

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

Co-funding Institution
MIC – Italian Ministry of Culture

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