Overview

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 (180587) and Butrus al-Bustani (181983), 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 bylanguage, desire and enjoyment.

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9781474491747

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Reviews

"Bou-Ali presents her case with verve, extensive scholarship and persuasion. This book presents an extraordinary contribution to the field of Arabic studies while it is at the same time inextricably an achievement in the field of contemporary psychoanalytic theory.-- ""Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana"" This is by far the most sophisticated study of the making of the modern Arab subject. Focussing on the region's 19th Century 'awakening', Nadia Bou Ali shows that it was debates about the Arabic language, rather than geography, ethnicity or religion, which came to constitute the privileged site for the conceptualisation as well as problematisation of history, nation and selfhood in the Middle East.-- ""Faisal Devji, University of Oxford"" Truly one of the finest contribution to the growing field of psychoanalytic and Middle East studies, Hall of Mirrors examines the effects of the forced modernization and capitalist capture of Arab-speaking countries, particularly as they were manifest in the phenomenon of Arabic 'literary modernism.' Eschewing the ready-made claims of deconstruction as well as liberal notions of interpellation, Bou-Ali locates in the literary experiments with their 'mother tongue' a relation of language to Arabic subjectivity that fully responds to the complexity of the political-linguistic situation. Forceful, original, and clearly argued, this book will not go unnoticed.-- ""Joan Copjec, Brown University"""

Author Information

Nadia Bou Ali, Assistant Professor, American University in Beirut.

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