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16th Annual Lotman Days "The End: Finality and Renewal in Culture" For more information, visit our website: https://www.tlu.ee/en/lotman-days-conference2026
"The end” is one of the most powerful and unsettling notions in culture. Human beings are endlessly fascinated by endings, whether of life, text, or civilisations, because they entail both the threat of general destruction and the possibility of rebirth where something completely new emerges in the place of the old.
For the semiotician and cultural theorist Juri Lotman, this striving is inherent to human nature, arising from the desire to comprehend the finite nature of human life and the perceived contrasting infinity of life itself. This duality serves as a significant catalyst for cultural change, becoming most evident in moments of crisis and transformation. In such periods, imaginings of the end often intensify, giving rise to a peculiar anticipation of endings.
Yet, as Lotman also cautioned, when we watch with fascination the oscillation of human culture between finality and rebirth, we often forget that what we are rejoicing over may, in fact, be our own end, because “it is also possible for something to perish without anything new arising in its place. Especially in a world where technological development is advancing so fast, perhaps faster than our intellectual capacity to make use of the possibilities that are being generated.”
The 16th Annual Lotman Days invites participants to reflect on endings as semiotic, cultural, and existential phenomena, not only as closures, but as thresholds of renewal. How do artistic movements, political systems, religions, scientific disciplines or societies come to an end or imagine their own limits? How might we understand “the end” as a creative mechanism rather than merely a point of disappearance? What is the function and semiotic potential of narratives of “the end” in periods when endings are no longer perceived as distant, but rather as ongoing?
We welcome papers on the topics of interest, including but not limited to:
Endings in artistic, literary, and cinematic texts
The semiotics of death, closure, and renewal
Cultural mechanisms of transformation
Endings as sites of translation, explosion, and unpredictability
Entropy, limitation, and self-restraint as cultural principles
The fascination with apocalypse and the aesthetics of collapse
The last sentence, the last frame: the function of the ending in artistic text
Endings, afterlives, and renewal in folklore, myths, and oral traditions
Cyclical versus linear models of time and history
Endings and beginnings in scientific and philosophical thought
The “end of culture” and “end of history” narratives
Eschatology and the imagination of the end in religious thought
Semiotics of extinction, loss, and regeneration in the Anthropocene
Fear, hope, and eco-anxiety in the age of environmental collapse
Imaginations of the end in conspiracy narratives and post-truth discourses
The role of media in constructing and amplifying collective perceptions of endings
The age of artificial intelligence as a new cultural threshold
Memory, forgetting, and the afterlives of the past
Temporalities of ending
Digital afterlives and the persistence of meaning beyond material limits
The end as an ethical and creative challenge
Confirmed plenary speakers:
Stef Craps, Ghent University, Belgium
Dolly Jørgensen, University of Stavanger, Norway
Eelco Runia, Independent researcher, Netherlands
We invite proposals for individual presentations (20 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion) or thematic panels. Kindly submit the abstract of your presentation by February 15, 2026. Links to submission forms can be found here: https://www.tlu.ee/en/lotman-days-conference2026
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