Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic: Hall of Mirrors

• It is the first psychoanalytic reading of Ahmad Faris Shidyaq’s Leg Over Leg (1855), one of the foundational texts of modern Arabic literature
• The 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 enjoyment
• The book is the first engagement with the failures of interpellation into liberalism in the late nineteenth century Arabic speaking world

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.