Reliquary: A Phenomenology of Kept Time
Christina Tudor-Sideri
forthcoming
In Reliquary, Christina Tudor-Sideri undertakes a philosophical examination of the temporal forces embedded in objects. Situated at the intersection of phenomenology, psychoanalytic theory, continental thought, and personal reflection, the book interrogates how time persists not as a linear succession but as an affective and often disjointed presence embodied within material things. It asks what forms of being arise from the refusal to relinquish, and what kind of temporality inhabits the relic. Further, it asks, echoing Elias Canetti: When does something become a relic? Rejecting the notion of objects as mere vessels of memory or nostalgia, Reliquary contends that certain things—whether kept, hidden, fractured, or forsaken—do not simply represent a past but continue to disturb and inhabit the present. These objects resist symbolism; instead, they enact a ghostly embrace, insisting on their continued vitality through withholding and haunting. Tudor-Sideri proposes a poetics of persistence, theorizing the relic as existential and experiential residue rather than sacred inheritance. Time, in this conceptualization, is neither continuous nor conclusive; it is wounded, erotic, recursive—a revenant temporality that resists closure. Rather than pursuing resolution or catharsis, Reliquary dwells in the aftermath, positioning the object as an interlocutor—a fragment through which the past remains active, carnal, and unresolved. It shifts the question from how we recover from loss to how we persist within its temporal folds. What philosophical significance does the object we cannot discard hold? How does one inhabit and live through the residues of what once was? Reliquary is a meditation on time and the phenomenology of the kept object, proposing a philosophy of holding on, of keeping and of being kept—a theory of the relic as the site where self and other and time intertwine in their most intimate and unresolvable forms.
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CHRISTINA TUDOR-SIDERI is a writer, translator, and researcher whose work unfolds at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and critical theory. Her research engages with the phenomenology of time, death studies, the philosophy of film, the aporetics of memory, language, and the [absent] body. Her literary and philosophical work is informed by an enduring interest in phenomenology, particularly how temporality, memory, and finitude shape human experience. She is the author of Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, a book-length essay examining the structural entanglement of myth, deferral, and ephemerality in human existence; the novels Disembodied and Schism Blue, which stage the dislocation of the self and the Other across nonlinear temporalities; and If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces, a collection of fragments that interrogates the limits of presence, witnessing, and mnemonic trace in the face of death. Her translation work, aimed at recovering underrepresented literary voices, includes texts by Max Blecher, Magda Isanos, Anna de Noailles, Mihail Sebastian, and Ilarie Voronca. Across both creative and theoretical domains, her research remains concerned with the question of how language bears the imprint of absence, finitude, and the irreducible Other. She writes with the conviction that literature is both a mirror and a threshold, and that to write is to dwell, however briefly, within the paradoxes that make us human.
