The Subject of Theory in Times of War

What is the role of theory in the production of the subject as both character and survivor of catastrophic events? In this talk, Tarek El-Ariss reconstructs a personal and historical narrative shaped by conflict, displacement, and literature. He expounds on the entanglement of the self in interpretive frameworks that are shaped by a comparative practice that draws on a wide range of literary influences and intellectual traditions. Starting with the psychoanalytic framework, El-Ariss excavates an affective register through a close reading of episodes of infestation, haunting, and collapse in his newly published book, Water on Fire: A Memoir of War.

Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. Born in Beirut during the Civil War (1975-1990) and trained in philosophy, literary theory, and visual and cultural studies, his work deals with questions of displacement, war, and desire. He has written about disoriented travelers, outcasts, queers, hackers, and characters with complicated relations to home. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham, 2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton, 2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (MLA, 2018). In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his new book, Water on Fire: A Memoir of War.

Comparative Methodologies is a research group that considers what it means to work comparatively in the humanities and the methodological foundations of comparatist work.