University of Toronto

Graduate Student, Centre for the Study of Religion

Thesis Title: Chronopolitics of Allegory in Talal Asad's Anthropology of Secularism

About

I am an editor and a student based in Toronto. I have years of editorial experience (copyediting, structural editing, substantive editing) on everything from grant applications to monographs. My primary work these days is as assistant editor for the 7-volume _Integrated Encyclopedia of the Qur'an_ project (first volume forthcoming summer 2012), but I am always taking on more editorial work - get in touch if you have a bibliography to format or a dissertation to proofread.

I just completed an MA at the University of Toronto. My MA thesis, "Chronopolitics of Allegory in Talal Asad's Anthropology of Secularism," sought to unsettle a law of genre by which Asad's work is disciplined--a reading practice that insists his work, for all that it can contribute to genealogical questions of history, has little to offer questions of politics and the political. The thesis orbited a few pages in the first chapter of _Formations of the Secular_, a few pages in which Asad recommends the guidance of Benjamin, rather than de Man, in understanding the long polemic between symbol and allegory and more generally in making anthropological sense of the secular. Asad then moves on to other questions--but the opposition between symbol and allegory has a long European heritage, with distinct periods, methods, and tropes associated with each. The thesis thus first situated Asad’s discussion of symbol and allegory with reference to turns in the history of rhetoric. Second, it followed Benjamin in differentiating the Trauerspiel from tragedy, and argued against claims variously made for the tragic sensibility of Asad or the tragic ethos of secularism. Attuning ourselves ethnographically to the temporality of Benjamin's allegory, it then argued, can help us move away both from narratives of secular disenchantment and the easy opposition between secular/homogenous and traditional/heterogenous time. Finally, by describing Benjamin's allegory as a way to address the relationship between the secular and modern politics, Asad makes a critical intervention into contemporary debates on political theology. I thus read Asad's comments on symbol and allegory as continuous with his explicit comments on Carl Schmitt, that is, as a call to rethink the politics of sovereignty.

A second project developed over the course of the last few years reads the work of various continental philosophers as it intersects with and at times explicitly cites Islamic intellectual tradition. One of the fruits of this project was an extended paper I am currently revising for submission, "Agamben and the Legal Consummation of Sunni Islam." The paper tried to understand the explicit exception Agamben grants Sunni Islam in his discussion of messianism as the limit concept of the law. Exploring the theologico-juridical terrain of Sunni Islam, I argued, brings one into dangerous proximity with the transcendental order, opening oneself--and the law--to risk. There, rather than in Agamben's exceptional messianism, may lie Sunni tradition's encounter with what Agamben calls the "problem of law in its originary structure." If, as Gil Anidjar has observed, the theological dimensions of Agamben’s politics-to-come remain to be read, so too the theological dimensions of forms of life not accounted for by him. Agamben explicitly leaves Sunni Islam absent from his otherwise forceful declaration that messianism constitutes the limit concept of monotheistic religious experience. This paper sought to explore the conditions of this absence. Sunni Islam's eschatology eschews the periodization upon which Agamben's messianism relies; its discursive, embodied practices shape temporalities at once comparable to and distinct from Agamben's notion of messianic time. The fold generated by the Sunni theologico-juridical apparatus between justice and law rehearses what Agamben described as the consummation of the law, even as it gathers the world into itself. Rather than marking the exceptional status of Sunni Islam, however, this research turned up remarkable parallels in the other traditions Agamben addresses--making it less a sectarian apologetic than a limit case for Agamben's project.

My interdisciplinary BA training (University of Alberta) was in critical theory, continental thought, and historical method. My major undergraduate project, "Relating Alterity in al-Andalus: Historiography, Maimonides, Difference," tried to understand the politics of nostalgia involved in contemporary liberal invocations of Islamic Spain. It surveyed the massive historiographical debates on the in/tolerance of al-Andalus with special attention to the various polemics about Jewish experience under Muslim rule. Rather than moralistically concluding that these differing histories are all somehow "wrong" or incorrect, I then tried to step away from the historiographical reliance on tolerance discourse to consider other ways of relating to difference. To this end I examined two moments in Maimonides's corpus that poetically employed legal fictions to re-figure Muslims within the categories of Jewish law.

Before beginning my undergraduate degree, I spent a year studying Arabic and Islamic studies in Damascus.