Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic

Nadia Bou Ali explores the formation of a modern Arab identity through the conceptions of politics, morality and language in Arab thought.

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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.