His presentation was titled "About the End of the World: Towards a Cosmopolitanism of Loss" in which he discussed the idea of the end of the world in reference to a sense of political futility that dominates the intellectual and artistic spheres today, brought about by the collapse of ‘the world’, understood as the symbolic structure that used to ground demands of universal justice, emancipation. Through a critical reading of Roberto Bolaño's texts, he considered what literature and art, and those who attend to them, can and can no longer do about the end of the world thinking through aesthetic forms and mediations.

Mariano Siskind is professor of romance languages and literatures and comparative literature at Harvard University. He is currently the chair of the romance Languages and Literatures department. He teaches nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American Literature with an emphasis on its world literary relations, as well as the production of cosmopolitan discourses and processes of aesthetic globalization. He is the author of three dozen academic essays and of a groundbreaking book on theorizing Global Modernity and World Literature titled: Cosmopolitan Desires. Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America published by Northwestern University Press, in 2014; It was translated and published in Spanish as Deseos Cosmopolitas in 2016.