Aaron Eldridge

Aaron Eldridge studies collective responses to cultural destruction and social precarity in the Middle Eastern and Muslim/Eastern Christian world, investigating the resonances of contemporary revolutionary and religious practices, the historicity of destruction, postcolonial theorizations of the capitalist state and its property regimes, and the work of the soul under terms of sectarian interpellation.

His previous research investigated Orthodox Christian monastic communities in Lebanon and their resurgence amid and after the destruction of Lebanon’s war and occupation (1975-1990). His book manuscript A Desert Place: Arab Orthodox Monasticism in Postwar Lebanon coordinates the flourishing of monasticism, its practices of dispossession, as a form responsive to the immiseration of life in contemporary Lebanon. He has also recently completed an annotated translation of Confession and Psychoanalysis by Syrian and Orthodox ascetic Aspīrū Jabbūr, a text that draws out resonances between Eastern Christian monasticism, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Islamic grammars germane to Sufism.

His new research project studies the conjoined Eastern Christian and Muslim land endowments of northern Lebanon, and the particular ways they orient communal responses to Lebanon’s many ecological crises through a theological language of the unseen.

Selected Publications

(Under Review) “Infinity at the Limit: Arab Orthodox Citations of Islam at the Monastery” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

(Under Revision) “Dispossessing the Waqf: Ascetic Temporalities of Struggle in Lebanon” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

2022 “A Tropics of Estrangement: Ghurba in Four Scenes” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, March 2023; 50 (1). Co-authored with Basit Kareem Iqbal.

2021 “Movement in Repose: Notes on Form of Life” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, June 2021; 30 (1): 19–49.

2020 “From the Margins of the Colophon: Arab Orthodox Monasticism in Ruins,” Exchange: Journal of Contemporary Christianities in Context 49, no. 3: 379-400