Psychoanalysis And The Love Of Arabic (hall Of Mirrors)

By (author) Bou Ali, Nadia
Short description/annotation:
Nadia Bou Ali shows how a curious relationship was forged between language and politics, one driven both by a desire for modernity and anxiety about it.
Description:
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''.
Description:
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.
Table of contents:
Introduction: The Mirror Of Language 　 Chapter 1: Literature as a Ruthless Excavator of Culture Fantasy: The Tain of Modernity The Subject and Ideology: The Ego’s Hall of Mirrors Who is the Other of Liberalism? The Non-Liberal Freud 　 Chapter 2: Love of Lugha and Lalangue Linguisteriks Medusa: The Image of Umma Encyclopaedic Prolepsis and the Anxiety of Knowledge Metathesis and Parapraxis: From Phoneme to Signifier 　 Chapter 3: Piercing The Bull’s Eye: The Sexual (Non-)Relation Voiding Verbiage: On Pleasure and Pain Undercapitalized Parasites and Antediluvian Capital Feminization Fantasies: Am I a Man or a Woman? Leg over Leg: The End of Procreation Thick-Turbaned Masters and Horned Women 　 Chapter 4: A Liberal Psycho-Theology Postlapsarian Nationality DiyaNa and Dayn: True Religion and Debt The Liberal Fantasy of a Puritan Nation Sentiments Of Exchange: Reciprocity and Guilt History Necromancy and the Logic of Sacrifice 　 Conclusion: The Abstractions of Homo Economicus: Now A Stomach, Now an Anus A Trace of Nothing that Was There Before Anxiety and Habit 　 　
Review quote:
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.
Review quote:
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