Aaron F Eldridge | University of Toronto (original) (raw)

Articles by Aaron F Eldridge

diacritics, 2023

This essay traces the ambivalent work of ghurba (estrangement, exile, alienation) across four eth... more This essay traces the ambivalent work of ghurba (estrangement, exile, alienation) across four ethnographic scenes: Orthodox Christian activists in austerity Beirut refuse to abandon the corrupted world; a Syrian Islamic scholar in Jordan insists on the patient work of rehabilitation; Orthodox ascetics in a monastic community outside Tripoli turn to the hidden alienation borne in the world; and a Muslim calligrapher in Canada relinquishes the guarantee of ethical relation. Taken together, these scenes form a tableau of estrangement in the shared vocabulary of Eastern Christianity and Islam. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah–in its articulations of soul, community, and world always already shadowed by their undoing–we then situate these four scenes along spatio-temporal axes of destruction and production, city and desert, paradise and hellfire: a purgatorial topology which modulates what Agamben calls the contemporary destruction of experience.

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences , 2021

Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8955808 How does tradition, a transmission of body a... more Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8955808

How does tradition, a transmission of body and language, disclose a form of life? This article takes as its point of departure Talal Asad’s methodological pivot away from the modern concept of “belief” to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “form of life.” It elaborates the philosophical and anthropological implications of a rigorous notion of form of life through Asad’s concept of tradition and Martin Heidegger’s rereading of Aristotle’s physis. Interrupting this theoretical argument, a scene from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with Orthodox Christian ascetics in Lebanon exemplifies the challenge (and insistence) of form of life. The article then turns to consider a powerful reading of form of life grounded in Baruch Spinoza’s theory of emanation and vitalist univocity. While echoing the concerns of this article, Spinoza’s philosophical ethic defers the central question posed by “form of life” by making the latter a world-producing apparatus. That approach to form of life foregrounds the possibility of being other than what one is, rather than the crucial question of “still experience” and its dynamic repose. The article concludes by reading this still experience alongside C. Nadia Seremetakis’s work in Greece, which details the work of stillness and memory, the deathly pain of history, as sites where the cultivation of noncontemporaneous forms of life are brought into relief.

Exchange, 2020

This article, drawn from two years of ethnographic fieldwork, traces the temporal articulations o... more This article, drawn from two years of ethnographic fieldwork, traces the temporal articulations of Orthodox Christian monasticism in post-war Lebanon. It recounts one Lebanese monastery’s reinhabitation—founded on the uncanny return of its martyred saints—as evidence of monastic life’s constitutive intimacy with ruination. The article subsequently explores the grammars of temporal delimitation (the juridical and territorial apparatuses of state land tenure as well as the archival trace of historiography) and argues that these approaches disable the possibility of accounting for such a return in ruins. Offering the Orthodox tradition’s language of ascetical dispossession as an analytic counterpoint, the article takes up the monastic language of renunciatory withdrawal. The temporality of this withdrawal, in its protological and its eschatological marginalization, brings into relief a form of time that presses upon the limits of historiography.

Book Reviews by Aaron F Eldridge

Political Theology, 2022

There is a Something that runs through the whole thread-namely, the continuous overlapping of the... more There is a Something that runs through the whole thread-namely, the continuous overlapping of these fibres. Ludwig Wittgenstein In his short piece "The Study of Geography" 1 Franz Boas distinguishes between a naturalist disposition arising "from the logical and aesthetical demands of the human mind," and what he terms "cosmography" which "has its source in the personal feeling of man toward the world, towards the phenomena surrounding him." 2 In order to exegete this latter analytic sensibility, the anthropologist marshals the words of Goethe: It seems to me that every phenomenon, every fact, itself is the really interesting object. Whoever explains it, or connects it with other events, usually only amuses himself or makes sport of us, as, for instance, the naturalist or historian. But a single action or event is interesting, not because it is explainable, but because it is true. 3

Other by Aaron F Eldridge

diacritics, 2023

This essay traces the ambivalent work of ghurba (estrangement, exile, alienation) across four eth... more This essay traces the ambivalent work of ghurba (estrangement, exile, alienation) across four ethnographic scenes: Orthodox Christian activists in austerity Beirut refuse to abandon the corrupted world; a Syrian Islamic scholar in Jordan insists on the patient work of rehabilitation; Orthodox ascetics in a monastic community outside Tripoli turn to the hidden alienation borne in the world; and a Muslim calligrapher in Canada relinquishes the guarantee of ethical relation. Taken together, these scenes form a tableau of estrangement in the shared vocabulary of Eastern Christianity and Islam. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah–in its articulations of soul, community, and world always already shadowed by their undoing–we then situate these four scenes along spatio-temporal axes of destruction and production, city and desert, paradise and hellfire: a purgatorial topology which modulates what Agamben calls the contemporary destruction of experience.

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences , 2021

Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8955808 How does tradition, a transmission of body a... more Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8955808

How does tradition, a transmission of body and language, disclose a form of life? This article takes as its point of departure Talal Asad’s methodological pivot away from the modern concept of “belief” to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “form of life.” It elaborates the philosophical and anthropological implications of a rigorous notion of form of life through Asad’s concept of tradition and Martin Heidegger’s rereading of Aristotle’s physis. Interrupting this theoretical argument, a scene from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with Orthodox Christian ascetics in Lebanon exemplifies the challenge (and insistence) of form of life. The article then turns to consider a powerful reading of form of life grounded in Baruch Spinoza’s theory of emanation and vitalist univocity. While echoing the concerns of this article, Spinoza’s philosophical ethic defers the central question posed by “form of life” by making the latter a world-producing apparatus. That approach to form of life foregrounds the possibility of being other than what one is, rather than the crucial question of “still experience” and its dynamic repose. The article concludes by reading this still experience alongside C. Nadia Seremetakis’s work in Greece, which details the work of stillness and memory, the deathly pain of history, as sites where the cultivation of noncontemporaneous forms of life are brought into relief.

Exchange, 2020

This article, drawn from two years of ethnographic fieldwork, traces the temporal articulations o... more This article, drawn from two years of ethnographic fieldwork, traces the temporal articulations of Orthodox Christian monasticism in post-war Lebanon. It recounts one Lebanese monastery’s reinhabitation—founded on the uncanny return of its martyred saints—as evidence of monastic life’s constitutive intimacy with ruination. The article subsequently explores the grammars of temporal delimitation (the juridical and territorial apparatuses of state land tenure as well as the archival trace of historiography) and argues that these approaches disable the possibility of accounting for such a return in ruins. Offering the Orthodox tradition’s language of ascetical dispossession as an analytic counterpoint, the article takes up the monastic language of renunciatory withdrawal. The temporality of this withdrawal, in its protological and its eschatological marginalization, brings into relief a form of time that presses upon the limits of historiography.

Political Theology, 2022

There is a Something that runs through the whole thread-namely, the continuous overlapping of the... more There is a Something that runs through the whole thread-namely, the continuous overlapping of these fibres. Ludwig Wittgenstein In his short piece "The Study of Geography" 1 Franz Boas distinguishes between a naturalist disposition arising "from the logical and aesthetical demands of the human mind," and what he terms "cosmography" which "has its source in the personal feeling of man toward the world, towards the phenomena surrounding him." 2 In order to exegete this latter analytic sensibility, the anthropologist marshals the words of Goethe: It seems to me that every phenomenon, every fact, itself is the really interesting object. Whoever explains it, or connects it with other events, usually only amuses himself or makes sport of us, as, for instance, the naturalist or historian. But a single action or event is interesting, not because it is explainable, but because it is true. 3