Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic : : Hall of Mirrors / / Nadia Bou Ali.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
• VerfasserIn: Bou Ali, Nadia,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (240 p.)

Explores the formation of a modern Arab identity through the conceptions of politics, morality and language in Arab thoughtIt is the first psychoanalytic reading of Ahmad Faris Shidyaq’s Leg Over Leg (1855), one of the foundational texts of modern Arabic literatureThe book investigates the modern love for Arabic through the psychoanalytic understanding of the subject of the unconscious, one that is divided by language, desire, and enjoymentThe book is the first engagement with the failures of interpellation into liberalism in the late nineteenth century Arabic speaking worldPsychoanalysis 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: The Mirror of Language -- 1 Literature as a Ruthless Excavator of Culture: From the Literary Mode of Being to Lituratterre -- 2 Love of Lugha and Lalangue -- 3 Piercing the Bull’s Eye: The Sexual (Non-)Relation -- 4 A Liberal Psycho-theology -- Conclusion: The Abstractions of Homo Economicus: Now a Stomach, Now an Anus -- Notes -- Index