Paradoxes for the Settler Soul: The Ascetical Philosophy of Tim Lilburn
Date
2023-04-28
Authors
Stuart, Tyler
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This thesis will explore the prose of Tim Lilburn, particularly his trilogy of essay collections:
Living In The World As If It Were Home, Going Home, and The Larger Conversation. These books are a record of Lilburn’s project of autochthonicity — an attempt to live undivided from the places he lives — and the challenges of such a journey as a European settler on stolen Indigenous land. Lilburn’s approach to this endeavour, which he considers a process of decolonization, resuscitates European contemplative thought to remedy the sapiential poverty of white settler culture and identity. Throughout this thesis, I examine the epistemological significance of Lilburn’s retrieval of these European traditions into North American colonial modernity — attending to what they reveal about the interior dispositions of white settler subjectivity and the cultural trappings of late capitalism. By engaging with the paradoxes coursing through Lilburn's body of work — a linguistic form famous for defying logic — I make a case for the importance of epistemic impasse, or aporia. That is, I argue that the peculiarity of Lilburn’s paradoxical thought, or the difficulty of grasping it, can, if one lets it, alert one to one’s own epistemic allegiances. And these allegiances, I will argue, have had devastating consequences not only for Indigenous peoples, but also for European settlers themselves. Ultimately, I argue that the paradoxical shape of Lilburn’s thought gestures toward the need for an ascetical, and therefore countercultural, knowledge.
Description
Keywords
Philosophy, Autochthonicity, Asceticism, Contemplation, Colonization, George Grant, Christianity, Plato, Monasticism, Ecology, Land, Sapiential, Interiority, Eros