Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic: Hall of Mirrors

by Nadia Bou Ali

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.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bou Ali mobilizes Marx and Lacan to theorize the advent and development of Arab modernity through the twin orientations of al-Shidyaq and al-Bustani, two 19th-century Lebanese writers who come to stand in for the positions of hysteria and neurosis, respectively (which could also be grafted onto sexual difference). She analyzes how each's relation to language, an enjoyment of the signifier in the former, and an encyclopedic compulsion in the latter (reminiscent of Borges' Library of Babel), influence their positions regarding political power, the development of liberalism and the nation-state, the Master Signifier, etc. I do wish, however, that we could have skipped some of the Psychoanalysis 101 that bogs down some sections, even if the reading was always well-done.