This conference aims to explore the loss of artworks in Balkan,Central, and Eastern European studies. We propose to researches three main themes : the loss of the physical media of artworks, the loss as a subject of art and reflection and the loss as a theoretical imagination. 

Argument

This conference takes as its starting point a question about the loss of artworks in Balkan, Central, and Eastern European studies. For nearly fifteen years, reflection on lost books, films, and more broadly corpora established itself as a field of research. The publication of Judith Schlanger's Présence des œuvres perdues in 2010 was a major milestone, proposing a conception of loss as a cultural and perceptual phenomenon. It was followed by Roger Chartier's book on Cardenio (2011), then by several collective projects in 2012, including the collection of essays “Mémoire(s) de la perte” (Acta Fabula) and Théorie des textes possibles. In the wake of this work, and continuing Schlanger's shift towards a phenomenological approach, William Marx devoted a course at the Collège de France in 2020-2021 to invisible libraries, before continuing this investigation in À la recherche des œuvres perdues.

Our aim is to highlight similar research carried out in Central and Eastern Europe. We would like to bring together the methodological tools developed in recent years by comparatists and philosophers with the issues facing a cultural area that is unique in two ways. On the one hand, in literature, unfinished (Musil), aborted (Dostoevsky), or hindered (Schulz) works have long occupied a place in the canon and in history. On the other hand, this area has been deeply marked, even in the most recent past, by cultural erasure projects. We hypothesize that, in this field, loss is not only a condition of research, nor even an object of analysis, but that it has produced a theoretical imagination, paradigms, in short: a discourse for thinking about cultural objects. It is this artistic and theoretical fertility of semantic constructions around the idea of loss that this conference intends to explore.

The loss of objects

The first theme of this conference is devoted to the loss of the physical media of artworks and the methodological consequences that this entails.

Destroyed or inaccessible manuscripts, lost editions, fragmentary or closed archives, obsolete technical media, deliberately incomplete collections; the loss of media can also be considered a priori as in recent works devoted to “Undone Cinema”: these have shown that the absence of film media can become the starting point for a rigorously documented investigation, attentive to the material and institutional conditions of incompleteness. We particularly value research that questions the status (epistemic, artistic) of substitute objects and the type of discourse that can be produced from them: discourse on the object they replace and/or discourse independent of it.

Loss as a subject of discourse

The second theme we invite contributors to explore concerns loss as a subject of art and reflection in Central, Balkan, and Eastern Europe.

The sense that the “forces of loss” prevail over the “forces of preservation” appears very early on as a question that structures these creative spaces. This logic of erasure can be seen, for example, in the work of Danilo Kiš, where the poetics of archives, closely linked to the anxiety of a lack of historical inscription, aims to reconnect with disqualified existences. It also unfolds in the cinematic devices of Béla Tarr, whose prolonged shots seem to vainly hold back, through a gesture of temporal suspension, a world doomed to entropy. This imaginary of loss finally finds a plastic equivalent in the late works of Anselm Kiefer, where ruin no longer appears as the residue of past destruction, but as the original condition of European history itself, as evidenced by the unstable architecture, “always already in ruins,” of the Seven Heavenly Palaces. Far from characterizing exclusively the production of the second half of the 20th century, the imagery of loss had already given rise, earlier on, to a whole series of artistic devices, particularly narratological ones. One might think, for example, of the insertion of incomplete documents, as seen in Pushkin's “Diary of Onegin”. Similarly, Susanne Fusso has suggested that the partial destruction of the manuscript of Dead Souls by Gogol was a performance by the author, who unwittingly left the text incomplete, like the remnants of a disaster, giving it a kind of spectral double meaning. One might also wonder whether this seemingly “modern” tendency to integrate destruction or impermanence into the very heart of the artistic device would not benefit from being placed within older cultural paradigms, such as the Baroque, which structured much of Central, Eastern, and Balkan Europe. Without going into an analysis of works from a period too distant for our purposes, it will be fruitful to examine how, from the 19th century to the present day, artists, critics, and researchers have reconfigured this heritage, the most emblematic case being perhaps that of Walter Benjamin.

The paradigms of loss

The third axis invites us to think of loss not simply as an object of study, but as a theoretical imagination capable of structuring the analysis of objects that do not directly fall within its scope.

Benjamin’s work allows us to bridge these two questions. The philosopher does not merely confer a reflexive presence on objects that have actually been lost, such as the books in his library scattered during his exile. He also develops an interpretation of modernity as an accumulation of anthropological losses: the loss of the ability to share an experience in The Storyteller, the loss of aura in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the loss of the original purpose of language in On Language in General and on Human Language, etc. Similar considerations could be made about Martin Buber's reflections on the idea of alternating periods of “dwelling” and “exile” for humanity, or Györg Lukács's reflections on the feeling of homelessness (Obdachlosigkeit) as a defining characteristic of modernity. In all these situations, the present moment in history is characterized by something that it lacks. Not content with providing these descriptive tools, paradigms also shape the methodological discourse of researchers. In this regard, studies devoted to Central, Eastern, and Balkan Europe are part of a perspective that is, in essence, common to any historical approach: to make loss, and the impossibility of producing a fully coherent discourse on history, a kind of fundamental truth. This situation stems from a well-known observation, as pointed out by William Marx: erasure is the ordinary fate of cultural artifacts. Faced with this fundamental impossibility, research in recent years seems to have adopted, explicitly or implicitly, a strategy of giving loss a positive connotation. This choice is not limited to highlighting the preponderance of what is missing but also aims to reinsert the lost object into the preserved object, the individual present among the crowd of absentees. This surviving material sometimes tends to be invested with a paradoxical status: that of a miracle, an anomaly, or even an error in the ordinary course of history, which scholarly work would attempt to bring back into the common regime. We will pay particular attention to contributions that, while undertaking this work of making things visible, offer a critical objectification, reflecting on the presuppositions and effects of such research positions. In line with another work by Judith Schlanger, Les Métaphores de l’organisme (Metaphors of the Organism), we will examine the “advantages” of this theoretical imagination: what the idea of loss has made us see or, on the contrary, miss; what it has made us gain or, indeed, lose.

Finally, we hope that this conference will be an opportunity to reflect on how these paradigms are being disrupted today by the tragic events unfolding across Europe. Since February 24, 2022, more voices have been raised in the intellectual fields of the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, demanding or provoking a real break in the way we articulate the past, present, and future. One example is the poet Maria Stepanova, who, in a speech given in December 2023 at the Observatoire du Sensible, called for moving beyond the regime of “presentism” theorized by François Hartog, in order to consider forms of futurity (buduščnost’). Similarly, the recent shift from postcolonial to decolonial thinking, as analyzed by Victoire Feuillebois, seems to reflect a desire to move beyond a post-catastrophic mindset toward a forward-looking, action-oriented approach. Therefore, if such a shift in the way we conceive historical experience were to take place, it would inevitably affect our relationship with lost objects. These would cease to appear as mere relics of a process of disintegration and would instead be considered in their own time, as objects that have realized certain projects and potentialities at the expense of others. We would therefore be very interested in hearing contributions that propose, based on the corpus of our areas of expertise, new ways of thinking, on the one hand, about lost objects as carriers of activated or inhibited powers; and, on the other hand, about the ethical relationship that researchers must maintain with these powers.

This conference will lead to a publication.

Submission Guidelines

Your proposals (in French or English), in the form of a title, a summary of around 300 words and a bio-bibliographical note, should be sent to: andela.radonjic@sorbonne-universite.fr ; poussonguilhem@gmail.com and romain.marmont@gmail.com,

by March 22nd, 2026,

When/Where: 8-9 October 2026, Paris

Organization Committee

• Andjela Radonjic (Sorbonne Université - CNRS)
• Guilhem Pousson (Sorbonne Université - CNRS)
• Romain Marmont (Sorbonne Université - CNRS)

Scientific Committee

• Nicolas Aude
• Daniel Baric
• Luba Jurgenson
• Jana Kantoříková
• Clara Royer
• Kinga Siatkowska-Callebat

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