Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic reorients the debates around Arabic and global modernity in relation to psychoanalysis, capitalism and universality. The study offers the first psychoanalytic reading of 19th-century works written during the nahda movement by Ahmad Faris Shidyaq (1805-87) and Butrus al-Bustani (1819-83), showing how a curious relationship was forged between language and politics - one driven by both a desire for, and anxiety about, modernity. In analysing the abstractness of national belonging as belonging to the language, author Nadia Bou Ali considers why modern Arabic grammarians fell in love with language again and explores how language became ideated as a 'mirror of the nation'. Bou Ali argues that the problems of language speak for the subject of the unconscious, divided by language, desire and enjoyment.
About the AuthorNadia Bou Ali is Lecturer on the Civilization Studies Program at the American University in Beirut. She has published articles in Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures and Third Text and published a chapter in the collection Collecting Practices in the Arab Middle East: Alternative Visions of the Past, edited by Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and John Pedro Schwartz (Ashgate Publications, 2011).
Book InformationISBN 9781474409841
Author Nadia Bou AliFormat Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University Press