Genealogies of Inactivity in Eastern Europe after 1945

The project explores various forms and practices of inaction in Eastern Europe, challenging the common assumption that inactivity is simply the absence or opposite of action. Beginning with the repressive political conditions following the Second World War – where ‘action’, with its idealised enlightenment connotations of self-determination and sovereignty, often proved impossible – and extending to the present moment of capitalist exhaustion, the research examines how psychic and physical withdrawal may give rise to renewed creative, artistic, and aesthetic practices of resistance. In this context, inaction appears as a means of countering dominant paradigms rather than a mode of compliance. The project is particularly interested in how inaction disrupts action-centric frameworks – such as the vita activa – and opens up new perspectives on the relationship between activism, aesthetics, and the public sphere. It considers how these practices might be reimagined or revived under conditions of contemporary political duress and stalemate. By placing Eastern European practices of inactivity in a cross-temporal and diacritical dialogue with their Western counterparts, the project explores how differing concepts and aesthetics of action and inaction confront, complement, and complicate one another.